Barry Jay Kaplan is the author of the novels Black Orchid (with Nicholas Meyer), and Biscayne, both selections of the Literary Guild. His short stories have appeared in Descant, Bryant Literary Review, Central Park, Appearances, Talking River, Kerouac Review, Northern New England Review, Upstreet, Brink, Amarillo Bay, Perigee, Apple Valley Review, Drum, Brink, New Haven Review and others. His stories have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have been part of Best Stories on the Web.
As a playwright he has won the Whitfield Cooke Best Play Award from New Dramatists and a grant from New York State Council on the Arts. His play Landscape of Desire is published by Smith and Krause and was the American representative to the 25th Australian National Playwriting Conference. His musical biography of Rock Hudson, Rock and Roy (music by Stephen Weinstock), was developed at New Dramatists with grants from the Frederick Loewe Foundation and the Cameron Mackintosh Foundation and had workshop productions at New Dramatists in New York and at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, both directed by Simon Callow. Like Love (music by Lewis Flinn) won a DramaLeague New Directors/New Works Project Prize and premiered at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. In partnership with Rosemarie Tichler, he is the author of the interview books, Actors at Work and The Playwright at Work. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop where he had an assistantship to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.