Catherine Ann Jones

Catherine Ann Jones is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and author. She wrote the screenplay for the film The Christmas Wife ^[1] and Unlikely Angel. ^[2][3] She wrote several episodes of the television series Touched by an Angel. She has written two books about writing The Way of Story: The Craft & Soul of Writing^[4] and Heal Your Self with Writing (Nautilus Book Award 2014).

After playing major roles in more than fifty plays including on Broadway, she became disappointed by the lack of good roles for women and wrote a play about Virginia Woolf, titled On the Edge. The play was written before many of Woolf's diaries were published but was prescient in understanding how Woolf was thinking. The play won a National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Aspen Playwrights Conference Award and the Eugene O'Neill Award.^[5] Ten of Jones's plays, including Calamity Jane (both play and musical) and The Women of Cedar Creek, have won multiple awards.^[6]

She holds a graduate degree in Depth Psychology and Archetypal Mythology from Pacifica Graduate Institute,^[7] where she has also taught.^[4] She received a Fulbright Research Scholar award to study shamanism in India.^[8] She has taught at The New School University, University of Southern California, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the Esalen and the Omega Institutes.^[6] She has been a panelist at the Ojai Film Festival.^[9] Terri Belford has described Catherine Ann Jones as a "socially responsible screen writer."^[10]

When she was 19 she met the famous East Indian writer and Novelist Raja Rao who was lecturing on Indian philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin.^[11] They were married in Paris in 1965 and had one son, Christopher Rama Rao. The marriage ended in divorce.^[12]

References