User:DavidHyrum/sandbox

Mahonri Stewart is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, editor, and poet. His first play Farewell to Eden premiered at Utah Valley University on November 13, 2003, and was directed by James Arrington. Farewell to Eden went on to receive second place for the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival's National Playwriting Award and also received a National Selection Team Fellowship Award. The Artistic Director of the Festival went on to say that, "Farewell to Eden was one of the best original plays I've seen." . Over two dozen of his plays have since been produced, most of which have been published by Leicester Bay Theatricals, Zarahemla Books, and Prospero Arts and Media, most notably Legends of Sleepy Hollow, winner of the 2004 Ruth and Nathan Hale Comedy Playwriting Award; A Roof Overhead, winner of the Association for Mormon Letters Award for Drama; The Fading Flower; Swallow the Sun: The Early Life of C.S. Lewis; Jimmy Stewart Goes to Hollywood; and The Drowned Book: The History of William Shakespeare, Part Last. His screenplay Rings of The Tree, which was based on another of his plays that performed at UVU, was the winner of the 2011 LDS Film Festival's screenwriting contest. His novels include a novelization of his Farewell to Eden and his biographical novel about Joseph Smith, A New Age of Miracles.

Although a good deal of his early work connected with Stewart's relationship with Mormonism and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Stewart has publicly stated that he is "non-traditional" in his faith and that he is transitioning to the Community of Christ, a Church with a connection to Mormonism's past, but with a more liberal, feminist, and LGBT+ friendly bent than the LDS Church.