Silver Ticket Award Mentor
Sky Gilbert
playwright, director, educator, poet
Program areas: directing, playwrighting, self-producing, founding a company
Sky Gilbert is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, theatre director, and drag queen extraordinaire. He was co-founder and artistic director of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre — one of the world’s largest gay and lesbian theatres — from 1979 to 1997. He has had more than 40 plays produced, and written 9 critically acclaimed novels and three award winning poetry collections. He has received three Dora Mavor Moore Awards as well as the Pauline McGibbon Award, The Silver Ticket Award — and the ReLit Award for his novel An English Gentleman. There is a street in Toronto named after him: ‘Sky Gilbert Lane.’ Sky’s most recent play ‘Greg’s Cookies’ was recently produced in fall of 2023 at The Imp in Toronto. His second book about Shakespeare — Shakespeare Lied — was just published by Guernica Editions in 2024. He is presently working on his 10th full length novel The Blue House, to be published by Cormorant, in 2025. Dr. Gilbert is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph (where he taught theatre and creative writing from 1998-2022).