Keith Josef Adkins is a playwright, screen writer, director, and producer from the United States, and serves as the Artistic Director for the New Black Fest theatre festival.^[1][2] Adkins and the New Black Fest received the 2016 Samuel French Theatre Award for Impact & Activism in the Theatre Community.^[3] He was the recipient of the 2015 Helen Merrill Mid-Career Playwright Award from the New York Community Trust.^[4] In March 2022, he was named as a finalist for the 2022 Steinberg/ACTA New Play Award.^[5]

He was nominated for the 2012 Jeff Award for Best New Work for his play Last Saint on Sugar Hill.^[6]

He was the 2007 Duncanson Artist-In-Residence at the Taft Museum of Art.^[7]

https://www.daytondailynews.com/entertainment/arts--theater/world-premiere-playwright-keith-josef-atkins-opening-cincinnati/OaJ0cennJcywGT8GNSqEWL/

• family had been in southwest Ohio as free people since the 1780s
• graduate of Wright State University, studied journalism and later became interested in acting and spoken-word poetry
• MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa’s Playwrights Workshop (1996)^[8]
• has lived in New York City and San Francisco
• quote from Adkins: “The stories are always different, but the themes are similar. I keep writing about individuality versus community, about individual families trying to sustain their dignity and freedom.”
• lots of discussion of Safe House

https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/article/keith-josef-adkins-and-the-world-premiere-of-the-west-end/

• grew up in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Cincinnati
• based in Los Angeles

https://www.wvxu.org/show/cincinnati-edition/2021-10-13/the-west-end-keith-josef-adkins-playhouse-in-the-park

• inspired by interested in personal genealogy
• Safe House was loosely based on mother's family since 1780s
• dad's family moved to the West End from Georgia (1920s-40s)

https://stagebuddy.com/theater/theater-feature/interview-keith-josef-adkins-pitbulls^[9]

• Adkins is "co-founder and Artistic Director of The New Black Fest"
• "His work often explores the many facets of the black diaspora and sheds light on false preconceptions."
• Adkins: "I grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati and on my street one of my neighbors had a pitbull farm in the back of his house.  They fought dogs every Saturday when I was growing up from the age of 9 to 18 when I went to college.  I grew up listening and seeing those dogs.  I wanted to tell the story of these isolated people."
• Adkins: "when you have a group of people who are marginalized, institutionally marginalized, economically and socially marginalized, particularly in the black community and poor, the black poor... there is a lot of silencing.  A lot of things aren't shared.  ...  In between people don't feel like they have a voice and somehow these pitbulls fighting and the raising of them to fight is an extension of how people feel about how they're treated and made to feel about themselves.  It's a way to express the rage.  In a way the pitbulls symbolize an internal rage within the black and often poor community."

NYT review "In the Maelstrom of Harlem’s Gentrification, and Nothing Is Sacred" -- The Last Saint of Sugar Hill

• Premier at National Black Theater
• describes the setting as "Harlem in the throes of gentrification"
• review notes that the plotting stretches plausibility
• Plot:
  • main character Napoleon, an African-American "vicious Harlem landlord" hoping to get rich off of the neighborhood gentrification. His son Dexter is secretly running a medical clinic serving homeless people; the other son, Z, is partying and helping his father's business.
  • the review refers to "the central mystery" of the play being solved by one of the patients at Dexter's clinic

• Fight of a Migrant
• The Dangerous
• Sugar and Needles 

• The Final Daze
• On the Hills of Black America
• Sweet Home, 2003, Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2003
• The Patron Saint of Peanuts, 2004, Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Southern Writer's Project
• Farewell Miss Cotton, 2006, Black Dahlia Theater
• Cobra Neck, 2003, Humana Festival 2003
• Crossing America, 2005, Mark Taper's New Works Festival
• Sketches of Yucca
• Wilberforce, 2005, National Black Theater Festival
• Hollis Mugley's Only Wish + Seeds Sold + Grey Haired Smoochies with Rufus [three shorts], 2000, Intersection/Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience in San Francisco^[10]
• Salt on Sugar Hill, 2003, Mark Taper's New Works Festival
• Last Saint on Sugar Hill, 2012, World premiere at MPAACT Theatre in Chicago ^[11]
  • review in NYT^[12]
• Safe House, 2014, World premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park^[13]
• Pitbulls, 2014, World premiere at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater^[14]
  • review in NYT^[15]
• The People Before The Park, 2015, Premiere Stages^[16][17]
  • review in NYT^[18]

• The West End, 2021, World premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park^[1]

• P-Valley^[19]
• The Good Fight
• The Other Hamilton^[20]
• Girlfriends^[8]

• "My Stages of Revolution 2020", for A Call for Revolutionary Theatre 2020^[21]

• executive producer a forthcoming television drama The Other Hamilton^[22][23]