The Writers

Jennifer Woldman

Jen was born in California to a Filipino former nun and a hippie engineer from Illinois. Raised in the Bay Area, with an English degree from UCLA, some of her favorite gigs include professional Star Trek character at Paramount's Great America, JEOPARDY! Online question editor, and Director of Digital Operations for Sony PlayStation. Today, she splits time between her tech career as a Manager of Program Management at Salesforce, and writing from her home just outside Boston, MA. Her unpublished novel “Redemption” placed in the Top 25 in the 2020 Launch Pad Prose Competition, and was nominated for the James Kirkwood Literary Prize at UCLA’s Writer’s Program.

David Maddox

David has been a science fiction enthusiast his whole life, playing Star Trek characters at theme parks, the Riddler in a Batman stunt show, and Norman Bates on the Universal Studios Backlot. He holds a Cinema degree from San Francisco State University, has written several articles for various Sci-Fi websites as well as being a featured contributor to both the Star Wars Insider and the Star Trek Communicator. He has produced and directed short films that have been screened worldwide, and last year two of his other screenplays received Quarter and Semi-Finalist wins at the Austin Film Festival, Final Draft’s Big Break, Screencraft’s Pilot Launch and Cinequest’s Script Competition.

Statement of Purpose

In the summer of 2019, I was angry. Like every other “suburban woman” I knew, I had been angry since the fall of 2016, but that summer it reached a new level, for too-old reasons. Yet another unarmed Black man had been killed by the police. People cried out for justice in the streets, while the headlines screamed of more corruption at the highest levels of government. At first, I retreated from the news into True Crime stories and podcasts, where the women are often not believed, and predators are left free to hunt because of a deadly mix of red tape and apathy. In another attempt at escapism, I re-binged Sherlock on Netflix. 

Inspired by the New York Times’s 1619 Project, books like “Slavery By Another Name” by Douglas A Blackmon, “How to be an Anti-Racist” by Ibram X. Kendi, and the autobiographies of Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglas took up station on my bedside table and began to inform my dreams. For too long, as hollow monuments to American apartheid were mass produced and erected in cities and towns across America, an alternate, whitewashed version of our history has embedded itself in the American narrative, like a tick dug in deep. 

How would my privileged but kind white friends access the history we were never taught in school, but shaped us nonetheless? How could White America absorb this information without defensiveness, the ones who needed most to learn it? How could we plant empathy in the hearts of the skeptics, and draw the through line from that history to the present day, for those who use phrases like “All Lives Matter”?

How could I, a middle class, middle-aged, mixed-race daughter of an immigrant, a recent transplant from the West Coast to the East, make a difference? Did I have any business even trying? How could I not?

From that brew of journalism, art and history, from those questions, A Study in Scarlett was born. 

We bring the legendary sleuth across the Atlantic to America, as a half Black/half White woman in the 1860s after the Civil War, and unleash the brilliant detective’s mind on the events, circumstances, and mysteries of the Reconstruction Era. We open the empathetic heart of Doctor Joanna Watson, as ever Holmes’s partner and friend, to the social and cultural quandaries and contradictions of 19th century America. Through their complicated bond, we deepen our understanding of our complex American Union.

Art can teach even the most obstinate mind and reach the reluctant heart. Through art we reflect on our shared humanity. This show is a mirror, so that we can see more clearly, understand more deeply, love more freely, and stop repeating our mistakes. When hope ebbs, when the mystery seems too deep and the circumstances too dire, we need a Holmes. 

by Jennifer Woldman