George Tsypin, right, talks about his USITT Golden Pen award for 2008 with Bobbi Owen, left, USITT Vice President for Communications, during a book-signing session at the Annual Conference & Stage Expo in Houston, Texas.

Photo/Richard Finkelstein

Martha Marking
USITT Golden Pen Award Committee

Nominations for the 2009 USITT Golden Pen Award are being accepted until June 15, 2008. All USITT members are eligible to nominate books for the USITT Golden Pen Award, which honors an outstanding publication in the field of design and production for the performing arts.

Books are eligible for a three-year period from the date of publication. Nominations do not automatically carry over from one year to the next, but it is possible for a book to be nominated more than once.

Members can easily nominate a book by using the form located here. Members can also navigate to the form from www.usitt.org. Click on Major Activities, then the Awards link and follow it to the Golden Pen link.

Anyone with questions about the process may contact a member of the Golden Pen subcommittee of USITT's Publications Committee. Members are Martha Marking, markngma@appstate.edu; Mike Monsos, michael.monsos@umontana.edu; Rich Dunham rdunham@arches.uga.edu, and Lance Brockman, brock001@tc.umn.edu. 

The winning work should make a significant contribution to the field of theatre design and technology as an outstanding example of one or more of the following:

• scholarly research and critical thinking;
• presentation of the work and methodology of exceptional practitioners of theatrical arts and/or crafts; or
• description of the methods, skills and technology involved in creating works of theatre and/or crafts.

In the application, available online, nominators should address how the specific book fulfills one or more of these criteria. Nominations can be completed online.

Among previous Golden Pen Award recipients are 2008: George Tsypin The Opera Factory:Building in the Black Void, 2007: Andrew B. Harris, The Performing Set:The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart,  2006: Gordana Popovic Vasic and Irina Subotic, M. Tabacki: A Design Monograph; 2005: Meredith Chilton, Harlequin Unmasked; and, in 2004: Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron, The Invisible Art and Rosamary Ingham and Liz Covey, The Costume Technician's Handbook.

A complete list of all USITT Golden Pen winners can be found here.

The Publications Committee forwards its recommendations of potential award winners to the Board of Directors. Books that receive the USITT Golden Pen Award are added to the USITT Bookstore, where USITT members receive a discount on purchases.

Award recipients are invited to the USITT Awards Banquet as well as to the Annual Conference where members may meet the author(s) and have a purchased copy of the book personally inscribed.

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