About Me

A.M. Palson's plays revolve around the exploration of complex emotions and identity through heightened, often fantastical circumstances with a particular focus on LGBTQ experiences. Their work has been seen at Activate Midwest, Flint Repertory Theatre, American Stage's 21st Century Voices, Bristol Valley Theatre, Pegasus PlayLab, Women's Theatre Festival, and elsewhere. Awards include 2025 A is For Playwriting Contest Winner (First Place), The American College Theater Festival Gary Garrison Award for Outstanding Ten Minute Play (National Winner 2021), City Theatre's National Award for Short Playwriting (Finalist, 2019 and 2020), and The American College Theater Festival John Cauble Award for Outstanding Short Play (National Finalist, 2021). Works have been included in Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival 2025: The Short Plays collection,  We/US: Monologues for the Gender Minority (2022), Best Women's Monologues of 2021, The Kilroys List (2020), and Best Men's Monologues of 2019. Ames was Artist-in-Resident at The Mitten Lab in 2019 and resident playwright at Queer Theatre Kalamazoo in the 2019-2020 season. Ames graduated with an MFA in playwriting from Western Michigan University in 2020 and their PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2026. As a scholar, Ames studies LGBT theater in the late 20th century, theater as an expression of historiographical and archival research, and how documentary theater allows theater practitioners and audiences to revive the past, recontextualize the present as the future’s history, and collectively envision their future. Their dissertation Queering Documentary: Authenticity, Historiography and The Real in LGBTQ Theater of the 1970s," combines their interests in LGBTQ storytelling, theater as historiographical method, and documentary theater as archiving through exploring the raw and powerful theater of the LGBTQ movement in the 1970s.