P.J. Gibson photographs

1971-2009

P.J. (Patricia JoAnn) Gibson (1952-2022) was a Black American playwright, poet, writer, and educator. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Gibson was raised in Washington, DC and Trenton, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts in drama, religion, and English from Keuka College in 1973. In 1975 she received a Master of Fine Arts in theater arts from Brandeis University, which she attended under a Schubert Fellowship and where she wrote her earliest extant plays.

Over the course of Gibson's career, she wrote thirty-five full-length plays. Her work was performed both domestically and internationally, and of particular note is a tour of Africa she undertook in the late 1970s. She received a playwriting grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which resulted in her play Miss Ann Don't Cry No More (1980). She is perhaps most well-known for her play Long Time Since Yesterday (1985), which was the recipient of two AUDELCO awards, including Best Play. Gibson also wrote numerous treatments for both film and television, worked as a script doctor, and wrote and published poetry and fiction. Her prose works include erotica and romance novels that she authored under the pseudonym Magenta Rise.

While working as a writer, Gibson had a parallel career as an educator, most notably at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, where she served as a professor in the English department starting in 1992. While there, she received two PSC-CUNY research grants in order to support her playwriting. She also taught graduate courses at Rutgers University, was an instructor in an early academic outreach project at the University of California at Berkeley, and from 1987 to 1989 taught in the English department at the College of New Rochelle. Gibson was an instructor in playwriting at Playwrights Horizons in New York City and the Bushfire Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gibson maintained a long-standing working relationship with Woodie King Jr.'s New Federal Theatre, as well as George Houston Bass' Rites and Reason Theater.

Gibson was a member of the Writers Guild of America, East and the Dramatist Guild. She also served as board member and the vice president of programming for The League of Professional Theatre Women.

Gibson died on May 6, 2022 in New York City. After her passing, John Jay College of Criminal Justice established the P.J. Gibson Memorial Scholarship for Creative Writers.