IRENE O’GARDEN will be listed in Who’s Who of American Women in 2006. Her critically-acclaimed play, Women On Fire, starring Judith Ivey, was twice extended and played to sold-out houses Off Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre. It was nominated for a 2004 Lucille Lortel award for Best Solo Show, and is published by Samuel French. Two of its monologues are published in Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2004. Her new play, Little Heart, was awarded full development at the 2005 New Harmony Play Project. O’Garden recently received the Berilla Kerr Playwriting Fellowship from the Millay Colony for the Arts.

O’Garden won the Gold Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Best Book Award 2004 for her latest children’s book,The Scrubbly Bubbly Car Wash (Harper). Her first children's book, Maybe My Baby, (Harper) has sold over 78,000 copies.

O’Garden’s writing is anthologized with Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem and others in The Greatness Of Girls (Andrews McMeel) Included is an excerpt from her book, Fat Girl, which describes how she came to peace with food and body after a decades-long struggle. Harper San Francisco published it in hardcover with her drawings, and O’Garden has performed it throughout the US and Canada.

Irene’s poetry is found in literary journals such as CALYX, College English, Skylark, The Rockford Review, Whiskey Island Review, The Writer’s Forum and Chachalaca Poetry Review. She has taught poetry workshops at New York City schools (including Trinity and Wadleigh) as well as schools in the Hudson Valley, and has presented at Children’s Literature Conferences at NYU and Vassar College. Poets and Writers has awarded her several grants for poetry performance throughout the Hudson Valley. She has also performed her poetry with actress Ruby Dee as one of four “Exceptional Women Poets” at The Player’s Club in Manhattan. Irene has been awarded several residences at artists’ colonies throughout the country, most recently at The Millay Colony.

She lives joyfully with John Pielmeier, her husband of twenty-seven years. Most known for his play “Agnes of God,” John also writes movies for television. They make their home in Garrison, New York.