Award-winning author and playwright, as well as a screenwriter and writing consultant, Catherine Ann Jones is also an actor who has played major roles in some fifty-five plays on Broadway and off-Broadway. During that time, she became disappointed by the lack of good roles for women, which motivated her to write the play, On the Edge, about Virginia Woolf and her struggle with madness in a world gone mad with Hitler and WWII. The play won a National Endowment for the Arts Award.
Eleven of her plays, including Calamity Jane (both play and musical), The Women of Cedar Creek, and Freud’s Oracle, have won multiple awards and are produced both in and out of New York.
Her films include The Christmas Wife (Jason Robards & Julie Harris) which had four Emmy nominations, Unlikely Angel (Dolly Parton), and the popular TV series, Touched by an Angel.
She is the author of six earlier books, The Way of Story: the craft & soul of writing, Heal Your Self with Writing (Nautilus Book Award 2014), What Story Are You Living, Freud’s Oracle, Buddha and the Dancing Girl: A Creative Life and True Fables: Stories from Childhood. Based in Ojai, California, she leads The Way of Story and Heal Your Self with Writing workshops throughout the United States, Europe, Middle East, and Asia. For more info: www.wayofstory.com
Her connection with India began with her marriage to Raja Rao, who is usually clubbed together with R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand as the three authors who first established the international reputation of Indian fiction in English. Catherine’s connection with India continued with a year as a Fulbright Research Scholar to India, and continues through the annual visits that she has made for most of her life to India, where she spends substantial amounts of time.
India is in fact her spiritual home – as she explains in her Foreword to a collection of short stories exploring diverse and contrasting aspects of India, which was commissioned by Pippa Rann Books & Media for the 75th anniversary of India’s independence.
That collection of short stories by Catherine is titled East & West: Stories of India.