Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back playwright Judith Pratt. Her play “Queen Catharine” won the “Empowered” short play contest. Inspired by a grave alongside the Catharine Trail in New York State, it delves into the story of the legendary Catharine Montour, a famous Haudenosaunee leader (you may know the Haudenosaunee by the name Iroquois, which stands for a confederation of five, and later six tribes: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) who has become more myth than woman. Over the past few centuries, her life has been conflated with that of other Haudenosaunee women, details have been fabricated and realities misunderstood. Peppering the play with quotes from the letters of George Washington and General Sullivan, which are incredibly damning and unflattering, and the Native American creation story of Sky Woman, Judith skillfully digs away at the subterfuge Americans are taught in history class and shows us a different side of the American experience.
Read Judith’s moving play, “Queen Catherine,” in the “Empowered” issue of our online magazine, available here. You can subscribe or order the issue, which debuted September 1, 2022.
Judith Pratt has been an actor, a director, a theatre teacher, and a freelance writer. Her plays have been produced in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Kansas City (MO), and Cape Town, South Africa.
Then a character in one of her plays had a new story to tell—a story that would never fit on a stage. So she wrote a novel, The Dry Country. That was so much fun that she wrote another novel, Siljeea Magic. It was indie-published in 2019, the same year that her play Maize won a couple of prizes. Recently, her stories and essays have been published in The Gateway Review, Fifth Di magazine, Fiction Junkies, Hags Fire, and, of course, Synkroniciti Magazine, while The Dry Country won an Indie B.R.A.G. award.
Judith likes to read, and write, fabulism, aka magical realism. She lives in Ithaca, NY, with a husband and three cockatiels.
Take a look at her website.