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.