Germaine Shames, a Dramatists Guild Foundation National Fellow, Kilroys List playwright, and recipient of her state’s Literary Fellowship in Fiction, is author of the award-winning novels, Between Two Deserts and You, Fascinating You. Writing under the pen name Casper Silk (Hotel Noir, Echo Year), she has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene and P.D. James “on steroids”. 

A former Theatre major, Shames began writing for the stage in 2014 and was instantly smitten. In 2017, the playwright celebrated the New York City premiere of her musical comedy, Anna Karenina Lives!, and the selection of her drama-thriller, The Degenerates, for Williams Street Rep’s LAB New Play Series, and in 2018, the premiere of her protest play, Nasty. Shames' bio-drama, The Higher Love, winner of four national workshop competitions and a finalist for the Trustus Award, was revived in 2022 by Transformation Theatre. Her musicals, If the Spirit Moves (with composer Erin Murray Quinlan) and The Manifesto (with Nadav Amir-Himmel), premiered at Theatre Elision in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Her TYA play, Year of Thirteen Moons, had a digital production at the New Works Playhouse, was one of two winners of ThinkTank's 2021 TYA Playwrights Festival. The Robotics of Love and Longing, a dramedy that brings AI into the bedroom, won First Place at 2023 Fresh Reads. Sweet Spot, an interracial bio-drama set in the sports world, is a 2023 Fulton New Works winner. 

As a librettist and lyricist, Shames collaborates with award-winning composers in musical theatre, opera, choral and popular music. Her songs have been performed across a spectrum of venues and events in such cities as New York, Paris and Washington, DC. Her eco opera, The Bird Lady (with Timothy Miller), previewed at the National Opera Center. "Bomb Squad Rhapsody" and "An Open Letter to Samuel Alito", one-act operas, have premieres in 2022-23. Her immigration-themed musical, Capri (with composer Paul Scherer), won Skyline Theatre Company’s new musical search and was their singular offering at the 2022 NJ Theatre Alliance Stages Festival. Naked (with Tareq Abuissa) has won three competitions: Musicals NOW and the Colorado and Florida Festivals of New Musicals.

In addition to her original works, Shames has made a mission of adapting and re-imagining classic 19th and early 20th-century novels for the stage with an emphasis on those either by women or with strong women’s roles and relationships. Her D.H. Lawrence adaptation, The Virgin and the Traveler, formed part of the 2018 Festival of New American Theatre at Phoenix Theatre. A second Lawrence adaptation. The Lost Girl, won Starlight Theater’s 2019 Playwriting Contest and was subsequently produced by the S. Devon Players. Her Emile Zola re-imagining of The Masterpiece was a finalist for the Trustus Playwright Award, and her radical Nathaniel Hawthorne adaptation, The Scarlet Letter (Bible Belt, 1965), for LOCAL Lab. To date, the playwright has also adapted multiple works by Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley, and William Faulkner.

Claire Beckman, Artistic Director of Brave New World Rep, has written of Shames, "Germaine advocates for social justice with refreshing maturity, structural elegance, and gut punching dichotomies."
 
Shames holds a Master’s degree in Intercultural Studies. Her writing reflects the breadth of her worldview and fascination with the interplay of cultures, often drawing on events and settings from her sojourns abroad. 

Her work has earned her residencies at the Fundacion Valparaiso, Wildacres Retreat, New York Mills and Yellow Bird Artscape, three professional development grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, an Editor's Choice Award from the Historical Novel Society, and a scholarship to the Writers Center at the University of Arizona. 

It’s all about love.