Biography of Claudia Menza

Claudia Menza is a poet turned playwright. Her books of poetry are "Cage of Wild Cries" (Mosaic Press, 1990) and "The Lunatics Ball" (Mosaic Press, 1994). The latter had the beginnings of the play, including a couple of its characters, and a title that was "so descriptive of New York I had to use it again." Her “Poem for Miles Davis” was published in "The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian-American Women Writers" (Schocken Books, 1985), which is the winner of an American Book Award. Her work also appears in "I Speak of the City: Poems of New York" (Columbia University Press, 2007). She toured England in 1993 in "The Claudia and Charles Show," a scripted work about her literary marriage to her husband Charles Frye, based upon and using their work throughout the script. This is her first play; it began as a series of character monologues which she wrote as a transition from her poetry. She described how the play evolved, saying, "When writing in poetry, I wrote in first person to get inside the characters." Later, she performed the characters at universities, playing all the parts in an evening of about an hour.