Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas

Playwright and professor John Werner Trieschmann IV was born in Hot Springs (Garland County). Trieschmann cultivated his love of writing while spending his childhood and teenage years in hospitals and doctors’ offices due to Gaucher’s disease, a rare enzyme disorder that weakens bones and causes other complications. After graduating from Hendrix College in 1986, he went to Boston University to pursue an MFA while studying under Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott. In 1992, a year after returning to Arkansas, his play Lawn Dart won first prize in the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans Play competition. He published plays, both full-length and one-act, with the New York publishing company Playscripts and with Dramatic Publishing Company in Illinois. Trieschmann was also the first playwright to have been honored with the prestigious Porter Prize in Arkansas (1994). He died in 2024.