Milbre Burch is an award-winning performer, published playwright, lauded dramaturg and internationally recognized teaching and recording artist, Milbre Burch is a storyteller in every sense of the word. A recipient of the Oracle Circle of Excellence Award from the National Storytelling Network, she has appeared at the National Storytelling Festival eight times and told or taught at festivals and conferences in Spain, Austria, Slovenia, Taiwan and the UK. With Berkley Hudson she created the archival Storytelling Project of the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton University. Her short story "Sop Doll," a re-envisioned Jack Tale, was included in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection, edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow (St. Martin's, 2002). Milbre was nominated for a 2007 GRAMMY for her spoken word album, Making the Heart Whole Again: Stories for a Wounded World; her ensemble-driven play Holding Up the Sky (based on that album) was a Region V Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) invited production in 2010. The Region V KCACTF judges awarded a special commendation for her dramaturgy on Susan Glaspell's Trifles and her original one-act sequel to Glaspell's masterwork in 2013. That same year, her ten-minute play, Washing Up, was a finalist in the National Ten-Minute Play Festival. Her monodrama Sometimes I Sing was published in On Susan Glaspell's Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers" – Centennial Essays, Interviews and Adaptations, edited by Martha C. Carpentier and Emeline Jouve (McFarland, 2015). A co-convener of the Storytelling Section of the American Folklore Society from 2012-2016, she has a chapter, co-written with Patricia Sawin, on Fairy Tale Performance in a forthcoming volume by Routledge. Milbre holds a PhD in Theatre with a minor in Folklore from the University of Missouri and is currently a co-convener of the Playwriting Symposium of the Mid-America Theatre Conference.
