Emilie Pascale Beck is a transplant from Chicago who makes her home in Los Angeles, where she writes fiction, memoir, and plays. She was named a Best Emerging Writer by The Masters Review in 2024 and won the Levis Prize for Fiction in 2022. She has been a finalist for the Tennessee Willaims Prize in Fiction, the Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize, and the Smith Prize in Playwriting. Her work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing,Howlround, LA Stage, and the anthology Snapshots (Bloomsbury). She was the Literary Manager and Director of New Play Development for Boston Court Theatre, where she directed, dramaturged, and developed numerous world premieres. While there, she inaugurated the Playwrights Group to nurture and develop new generations of writers. Prior to that, as Associate Manager at Center Theatre Group, she reenvisioned and led the prestigious Sherwood Award. She began her career as a performer, and has acted and directed regionally and internationally, including a season as a performer with Boom Chicago in Amsterdam, and her plays have received productions, workshops, and readings around the country. Her undergraduate degree is from Northwestern in Performance Studies, with an MFA from Warren Wilson in Fiction Writing. She’s an advocate for people living with chronic illness, and serves as a volunteer on a committee for the Lymphedema Education and Research Network (LE&RN).
Press
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Tackling Challenges of Memory and History
Six years ago, the playwright Emilie Beck was home with a colicky baby and a mounting sense of disconnection from the rest of the world when she read about an exchange between President George W. Bush and Bob Woodward, the author and journalist.
Selected Praise
The Torch Bearer, a compelling, novel-in-progress, features a narrator – an actor, who “works in chaos theory” and is attracted to danger--whose complicated relationship to class and women is explored through compression, juxtaposition and sharply observed scenes. From its backstory hunting scene in which a six-year old boy asks his father “what is the opposite of pretend?”--the father initiating him into the mind of a predator, explaining that “even stalking is a meditation”--hunting becomes one of the novel’s presiding metaphors. Given its exploration of chance, causality and chaos, the improvisor’s “yes, and...” strategy, I look forward to seeing how this novel continues to unfold.
—Donna Masini, Judge of 2022 Levis Prize in Fiction
These balancing acts — between rationalism and faith, cynicism and joy — shape the play [Number of People] and its central character. … By writing a one-man play, in which a single character conveys his mounting disorientation directly to the audience, she has eliminated the so-called Fourth Wall, the tacit understanding that the audience and the actors inhabit different worlds, making their experiences comfortably separate. As Gold speaks to the audience, its members become part of his experience, and the intimacy of an individual voice renders Gold’s distress particularly powerful.
—Jessica Reaves, New York Times
[Number of People is a] brilliant piece of work by Emilie Beck. The message of it is that the living must carry the story of the dead. And if you kill the living, or the living don’t perpetuate the story, it furthers and initiates the killing all over again.
—Edward Asner, San Jose Mercury News interview
[Sovereign Body is a] dramatic poem about strife that delicately lays out its case through a blend of realism and surrealism. Sometimes no matter where or who you are, the sky simply falls. And that is what unites us, across eons and continents: That we all live with this capriciousness of destiny.
—Steven Leigh Morris, LA Weekly
Sovereign Body is rhythm driven: the overlapping, beautifully natural evocation of human speech produces a flow of quick, medium, and slow movements not unlike what audiences might experience at the symphony. These are doubled by intentionally choreographed sequences of household activities and re-doubled by the layering of complex ideas about mortality, poetry, family, and political discourse. Sovereign Body is both open-hearted and intellectually rigorous. It is about physical, mental, and emotional health, the palliative power of a loving family, and the frightening difference between that which we experience in concert with others and that which we must face alone.
—Toni Press-Coffman, Literary Manager
Trace is fearless, passionate, and relentlessly truthful.
—Lindsay Allbaugh, Co-Artistic Director, Center Theater Theatre Group
Beck has long served as Literary Manager for The Theatre @ Boston Court, while directing a number of first-rate productions of other writers. The whole point of dramaturgy is that the audience never apprehends anything you have done, but Beck has been midwifing so many substantial works by extraordinary playwrights, she must have had a great deal to do with the successful delivery.
—Myron Maisel, The Hollywood Reporter