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Idris Goodwin is an American award winning playwright, rapper, essayist, and poet. He is most known for his play How We Got On (2013), a portrait of three African-American teenagers dreaming of power and fortune in the Hip-Hop music scene. He also teaches Hip Hop Aesthetics and writing at Colorado College.

Early life
Idris Goodwin was born in Detroit, Michigan. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Film, Video, and Screenwriting at Columbia College Chicago. Goodwin also received his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues his graduate work at the University of Iowa’s Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Goodwin consistently lectures at colleges, high schools/middle schools, and other venues all throughout the United States.

Goodwin has said that his main inspiration is his family. He also credits “The playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright August Wilson, Chuck D of Public Enemy.”

Stage
Goodwin has worked as a playwright or performer in multiple plays such as Blackademics chew the flan waiting for death and/or tenure (2012), Bars and Measures (2014), And in This Corner… Cassius Clay (2016), and was one of the seven playwrights featured in Hands Up! (2017). The first play he ever wrote was titled Braising in 2005, and was performed in the back of a coffee shop. Goodwin recalls that the play was “thrown together and done on a budget… and miraculously we got a great review.”

Since then he has produced several successful plays such And in This Corner… Cassius Clay (2016), which received the 2017 Distinguished Play Award from The American Association of Theater and Education, and How We Got On (2013), which was premiered in the Actors Theater’s 2012 Humana Festival and is being produced at theaters across the nation. The play was also nominated for an ATCA Steinberg New Play Award.

Goodwin has earned awards from the Hip Hop Theater festival, The Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ford Foundation. In 2017, Goodwin won the Blue Ink Playwriting Award for his play HYPE MAN. The play takes place in wake of a controversial police shooting and it was selected as the winner in a pool of 543 submissions.

Film and TV
Goodwin has been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and was part of the cast on the documentary film What’s On Your Plate (2009), a narrative about two eleven-year-old African-American exploring their place in the food chain. He also performed on PBS’s Sesame Street, and for National Public Radio (NPR).

Essays
He published “These are the Breaks” a series of essays and poems in 2011. This was his debut collection of essays and it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the same year.

Plays

 * Braising - 2005
 * How We Got it On - 2012
 * Blackademics chew the flan waiting for death and/or tenure - 2012
 * Bars and Measures- 2014
 * The Raid - 2015
 * This is Modern Art (based on true events) - 2015
 * And in This Corner...Cassius Clay -2016
 * The Realness-2016
 * HYPE MAN - 2017

Albums

 * Break Beat Poems -2010
 * Break Beat Bars -2011