Photo by Peter W. Slattery
Cassandra Lewis is an essayist, novelist, and playwright exploring questions about social responsibility and ways to exist without causing harm. She is a recipient of the PEN America/L'Engle Rahman Prize for her work in the Prison and Justice Writing Program. Her creative nonfiction manuscript, THE BITING KIND, made The 2024 Short List for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, judged by author Deesha Philyaw, and her fiction manuscript, GRIEF CAMP, was included on the 2025 Short List and awarded a contract to be published by SFWP in 2027. FORGED LIFE, another fiction manuscript, was selected by Killer Nashville as a 2024 Claymore Award Top Pick.
Her words have also been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Terrain.org, Broad Street Review, The Belladonna Comedy, Mutha Magazine, Dramatic Question, NYC Playwrights, and other publications.
Her personal essay, "Mother's Day," was a finalist in the nonfiction category of the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards competition, and will be included in the anthology, No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, edited by Jenny Bartoy, forthcoming from Catapult in April 2026. This anthology was listed as "A Most Anticipated Book of the Year" by The Seattle Times, and described by Ocean Vuong as "A landmark work."
Cass was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship by the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an alumna of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Other honors include an invitation to be a writer in residence at Can Serrat in Spain, an acceptance to the 2026 Vermont Studio Center writing residency program, a Participant Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, a scholarship to attend Hippocampus Magazine’s Creative Nonfiction Conference, the Southampton Writers Conference Playwriting Award, and a Tribute from the State of Delaware General Assembly that “recognizes her exemplary talent and outstanding work in the theatre arena."
Her plays have been produced in London, Dublin, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and excerpts have been published in numerous Best of anthologies. She was shortlisted for the London-based Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize and served as an adjudicator for the Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre. She is a voting member of the Dramatists Guild.
Cass completed The University of Iowa's Irish Writing Program in Dublin, Ireland. She earned an MFA in Writing from New College of California and majored in Forensic Psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Day jobs that have inspired and informed her writing include her work with a Juilliard-trained movie star, individuals confined in a maximum-security prison, those in recovery, people experiencing housing insecurity, formerly incarcerated adults and youth, and other trauma survivors. She is a Writing Mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program and teaches creative writing at the Delaware Art Museum.