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Hello, fellow Canon-Expanders!

I wanted to send out an update on what we’re planning for 2025, and how it will be a bit different from the past years of the project.Fear not: the mission is the same! We’re still researching, reading, and curating.

 But let’s be honest: 52 plays is a lot of plays! 

If you’ve managed to read all 52 already, please email me and I’ll come up with some sort of prize for you to win. More likely, you’ve looked at the list, read a few, and hopefully told your friends and colleagues that there’s a whole treasure trove available for them on our website.

For the last 5 years in creating Expand the Canon lists, we have:

• Spent 100s of hours researching and unearthing titles and scripts

• Invited a committee of 30+ readers to help us evaluate many of the plays

• Held weekly or bi-monthly curator meetings, to narrow down the list to 9 or 16

• Hired dramaturgs to discover more about the writers whose plays we now love

• Recorded podcasts to engage around each play, to let you in to more detail

• Reached out to partner with theaters across the country to reach audiences

…and probably about 100,000 other things to make these lists, writers, and plays a success. To add them permanently to the canon, so in 50 years, we don’t need another company to create another database of 8,000+ titles, just to fill in the gaps of all the history they weren’t taught, seeing, and feeling seen by.

For 2025,

we’re going to keep honoring our 52 plays

by gender-expansive playwrights.

Keep falling in love with Mahasweta Devi, Amelia P. Rosselli, Yang Jiang, Madame de Staël, Hannah Cowley, Maruxa Vilalta, Mary Pix, Efua Sutherland… and all 52!

So what’s there to look forward to?

In 2025, we’re planning:

• 🤝 At least 4 partnerships around the country, and that’s just in the first half of the year!

• 📚 Our list this year: producing a Monologue book so actors and coaches can easily put these pieces into use

• 🔎 To focus on our Research Committee, which digs up plays for future readers

• 🎧 Podcasts featuring our 2025 list titles

• 👩‍🏫 A Women’s History Month campaign highlighting literary salons (and perhaps creating our own!)

• 🥳 A big bash in October to celebrate our legacies and theirs

…and more! Want to be a part of these initiatives? Have ideas, connection, space, or other resources? We’d love to get you involved!

The two easiest ways to make sure this all happens: sign up for a subscription & donate. I know you’re getting a lot of fundraising emails these days – I am too. We’re in a divisive world, where control of the guiding narrative creates history. A lot of organizations need your support; we do too. We can’t allow the erasure of women’s voices and history to continue – and even get deeper.

If you donate before the end of the year, donors will match up to $5k! Double your impact!

Now is not the time to be quiet. We are using our voices to uplift others; want to join us? Any amount you can donate – $2025, $52, $25, or $20.25 – makes a difference.

Change history & the future: Donate here!

Thanks for your support on this journey to right history,

Emily Lyon

Artistic Director

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