The nominations include:

Charles Smith for Playwriting
André De Shields for Lead Actor
Erin Cherry for Lead Actress
Chuck Smith for Director of a Dramatic Production
Gillian Glasco for Supporting Actress
Marie Thomas for Supporting Actress
Sean Phillips for Supporting Actor
Morocco Omari for Supporting Actor
Shirley Prendergast for Lighting
Anthony Davidson for Set Design
Ali Turns for Costume Design
Bill Toles for Sound Design
New Federal Theatre and Legacy Creative Arts Co. for Dramatic Production of the Year

Knock Me a Kiss quickly became one of the hot tickets during the 2011 National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Out of the 40 plays and musicals and countless readings and workshops of other new plays, Perry Tannenbaum wrote in Back Stage, “Among the best was Knock Me a Kiss.”

Tannenbaum also wrote, “the denouement of Charles Smith’s play (was) arguably the most significant moment of the entire festival.”

Referring to the canon of Black American Theatre, Tannenbaum wrote, “Knock Me a Kiss has a fighting chance of becoming part of that black theater canon.”

It was a great production and a brilliant cast. By the morning after the first performance, tickets for the rest of the run had sold out.

Woodie King, Jr.’s New Federal Theatre and Chuck Smith’s Legacy Creative Arts are currently working to bring Knock me a Kiss back to New York in the spring of 2012. Stay tuned for details.

Charles Smith is an award-winning playwright and member of the Playwrights Ensemble at the Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. He is an alumni playwright of the Tony Award-winning New Dramatists in New York, and Head of the Professional Playwriting Program at Ohio University.

Many of this plays use various historical contexts to explore contemporary issues of race, identity, and politics in America. His work spans a gamut from contemporary investigations of historic icons such as Denmark Vesey, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, and Alexandre Dumas, to examinations of race and politics in a more current setting such as the impact of the end of segregation on Chicago’s Southside.