Ana María Simo


Ana Maria Simo is a New York playwright, essayist and novelist. Born in Cuba, educated in France, and writing in English, she has collaborated with such experimental artists as composer Zeena Parkins, choreographer Stephanie Skura and filmmakers Ela Troyano and Abigail Child.
She has also made important contributions as a lesbian activist, co-founding projects such as Medusa's Revenge, the first lesbian theater in New York, the direct action group The Lesbian Avengers, Dyke TV, and The Gully online magazine.

Career

Writer

Ana Maria Simo was 15 when she began working as a journalist in post-revolution Havana, where her first book was published: Las fábulas , a short story collection. The book was published by Ediciones El Puente, a literary and publishing project which Simo co-directed along with its founder, the poet José Mario Rodríguez.
Simo immigrated first to Paris, where she attended Roland Barthes' seminar and studied sociology and linguistics at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes. In the mid-1970s she settled in New York, where she began her career as an English-language writer. Her association with playwright/director Maria Irene Fornes' theater workshop throughout the 1980s was pivotal in her development as a writer.
Some of her most notable works includes her 1990 play "Going to New England" produced at the INTAR theater. The New York Times' Stephen Holden gave the production mixed reviews, but also wrote that the play itself succeeded as "a study in physical and emotional claustrophobia" examining the traditions of Latin American machismo, Roman Catholic values, and erotic taboos.
Simo's "The Bad Play," a 1991 dance-theater collaboration with choreographer Stephanie Skura, also reviewed in The New York Times, was described as "a very broad and very funny parody" of the Hispanic soap opera with philandering doctors and cantankerous mothers-in-law.
Her 1989 short film, How to Kill Her, with Ela Troyano, premiered at the Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival and later went on to win first place in The Latino Film and Video Festival.
Simo's work has mainly been produced in New York City by venues including , , , the 's Latino Festival, , and the .
Simo returned to fiction with her first novel, , published by Restless Books in 2018 after she was a finalist for their Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Heartland reflects Simo’s preoccupations with race, immigration, sex, and the burden of the past with an unsettling mix of noir, irreverence and hyperrealism already present in her plays.  It was a finalist for the 2019 Triangle Lit Awards for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

Activist

Simo immigrated to Paris in time to participate in the student revolution of May 1968. Shortly afterwards, she participated in women's and lesbian/gay activist groups for the first time, including the Gouines Rouges, the MLF, and the FHAR.
In 1976 in New York, she co-founded the lesbian theater Medusa's Revenge with actor and director Magaly Alabau. In her book, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, Sarah Schulman writes,

"It is hard to find primary lesbian content on stage by an un-closeted writer before "Fefu and Her Friends" by Maria Irene Fornes in 1977. Or maybe it was Corinne Jacker's "Harry Outside" at the Circle Repertory Company in 1975. But, although each was sealed with a passionate kiss, both of these plays contained their lesbian content in subplots. Lesbian content was primary on stage at Medusa's Revenge at 10 Bleecker Street, the first theater in the world willing to produce our work."

In 1992, Simo co-founded the direct action group The Lesbian Avengers with longtime lesbian activists Maxine Wolfe, Anne-Christine d'Adesky, Sarah Schulman, Marie Honan, and Anne Maguire. The original group's sole stated focus: "Lesbian survival and visibility." The Lesbian Avengers inspired chapters worldwide. One of its long-term accomplishments is the annual Dyke March in New York City.
Shortly afterwards, along with video producer Mary Patierno and theater director Linda Chapman, she created Dyke TV. The half-hour television program produced by lesbians, for lesbians was aired on Public-access television across the United States for more than a decade. It included a mix of news, political commentary, the arts, health, and sports.
Simo also co-founded with writer and activist Kelly Cogswell, "to encourage activism and redefine and expand gay issues." It offered queer views of international news, U.S. politics, activism, race, class, LGBT issues, and included a Spanish edition.

Selected works

Novel