Germaine Shames, a Dramatists Guild Foundation Nat’l Fellow, Kilroys List playwright, and recipient of her state’s Literary Fellowship in Fiction, is author of the award-winning novels, Between Two Deserts and You, Fascinating You. Writing under the pen name Casper Silk (Hotel Noir, Echo Year), she has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, and P.D. James “on steroids”.

 

After covering world conflicts as a correspondent and witnessing firsthand the gamut of senseless tragedies behind the headlines, she realized that hard news could never convey an iota of the deeper story she was gleaning. She turned to fiction writing, learning that she can find light in the most horrific situations and leave readers, and now an audience, with hope.

 

As a playwright, Shames has celebrated premieres across the U.S. as well as abroad and been recognized in a number of festivals, including MAC 2026, Scripts in Play 2025, Scotopia 2025, LTA 2024 (First Place), Frank Silvera Writers Workshop 2024-25, Women’s Voices 2024, Fulton Theatre’s Stories of Diversity 2023, Pegasus Theatre’s Fresh Reads 2023 (First Place), Page to Stage 2023, ThinkTank TYA’s inaugural Playwrights Festival, Cimientos 2019, and Festival of New American Theatre 2018.

 

As a librettist-lyricist, Shames collaborates with world-class composers in musical theatre, opera, choral and popular music. She is proud to be a 2024 Puffin Foundation grantee and 2025 American Prize and Marian Anderson Social Justice Prize winner. Her eco-opera The Bird Lady (with Timothy Miller) previewed in 2021 at the National Opera Center. Her immigration musical, Capri (w’ Paul Scherer), won Skyline Theatre’s new musical search and was their singular offering at the 2022 NJ Theatre Alliance Stages Festival. In 2019 and 2020 respectively, Theatre Elision produced her musicals If the Spirit Moves (w’ Erin Murray Quinlan) and The Manifesto (w’ Nadav Amir-Himmel). Her operatic Edith Wharton adaptation, In Venice (w’ Paul Scherer), had its concert premiere in NYC in 2024, and her pro-democracy opera, Unbroken (w’ Jane Kozhevnikova), that same year.

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Shames holds a Master’s degree in Intercultural Studies. Her writing reflects the breadth of her worldview and fascination with the interplay of cultures, often drawing on events and settings from her sojourns abroad. She writes from a global perspective with the conscious aim of fostering interethnic, intergenerational and cross-gender understanding.

 

It’s all about love.

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