Jon Elston and Bella Poynton

JON ELSTON is a career educator and the award-winning author of over thirty plays and musicals. In 2002 Elston co-founded Buffalo's Road Less Traveled Productions, where he supported the development of hundreds of new plays and the production of nearly forty world premieres by WNY playwrights. His own plays have been produced in Buffalo, New York City, Washington, D.C., and online. He has taught and directed at the University of Buffalo, Niagara University, SUNY Erie, SUNY Niagara, Medaille College, Villa Maria, and the University of Omaha, as well as in WNY schools as a theatre instructor and certified ELA teacher.

BELLA POYNTON is a playwright, director, dramaturg, and theatre historian. Her plays have been published with Samuel French, Broadway Play Publishing, Next Stage Press, Applause, Smith & Kraus, and can be seen in The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2025, The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2024, The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2019, The Best American Short Plays 2018-2019,The Weirdest Plays of 2020, WE-US: Monologues for Gender Minority Characters. Poynton is the winner of the 12^th annual Inkslinger Playwriting contest, the 5^th annual Black Swamp Players Playwriting contest, and is a recipient of the 2025 Bethany Arts Multidisciplinary Artists Residency for her play 2191. Her work has been developed at the Great Plains Theatre Festival, New Art City Theatre, Samuel French OOB Festival, Comparative Drama Conference, and Hudson Valley Theatre Festival among others. She is the senior co-chair of the Practice/Production symposium at the Mid America Theatre Conference, the director of the Playwrights Wing at First Look Buffalo Theatre Company, and a SUNY AI Teaching Fellow for SUNY Oswego State University. Poynton is currently working on an edited volume of short science fiction plays for Bloomsbury press. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at SUNY Oswego.