Naked in the Streets: A Memoir in Prose, Poems & Stories

The celebrated poet and playwright Murray Mednick recounts his journey from an impoverished childhood in the Catskills to the poetry cafes and storefront theaters of the Lower East Side during the turbulent 1960s, and from there to Los Angeles where he became a leading figure in the theater movement that flourished there in the 1980s and 90s. Depicting his struggles with addiction, the book is lit up with poems and stories told in the author's streetwise, syncopated style. 

Murray Mednick is the
founder of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and Workshop, where he served
as Artistic Director from 1978 through 1995. Born in Brooklyn, New York in
1939, he was for many years a playwright-in-residence at New York’s Theatre Genesis,
a seminal group in the development of Off-Off Broadway. He is the recipient of
two Rockefeller Foundation grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE, several
Bay Area Critics Awards, a 1992 Ovation Lifetime Achievement Award from Theatre
LA for outstanding contributions to Los Angeles theater. Mednick was awarded
the 2002 Margaret Harford Award for Sustained Excellence in Theater by the Los
Angeles Drama Critics Circle, and a lifetime achievement award from L.A.
Weekly.