Ms. J. e Franklin is best known for her play Black Girl, first produced in 1969, by W-GBH Boston.

In 1971, it was picked up by The New Federal Theater, and moved to The Theater De Lys, where it ran for over 800 performances, won a New York Drama Desk Award, and was the only play of the 1971-72  season to be optioned for Hollywood.  Ms. Franklin wrote the screenplay for the feature-film, which Ossie Davis directed, and in which Ruby Dee played an unforgettable cameo-role!  The film starred Peggy Pettitt, Brock Peters and Leslie Uggams.   In 1984, the McGinn-Cazale/Second Stage Theater selected Black Girl for its series on American Classics.

Ms. Franklin’s other film credits include “That’s Why They Calls Us Colored,”  starring Rod Bladel and Vinie Burrows, and directed by Malika Nzinga.  The film won the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Spirit Award, and premiered at both The Dwyer and Magic Johnson Theater.

Ms. Franklin’s other plays include several sets in the Ten-Minute genre, one of which, “Some Woman’s Son,”  was a recent winner in the Tennessee Williams Inaugural 10:4:TENN National Ten-Minute Play Contest.   Written as units of thematically-connected ten-play sets, called “decatets,”  Coming to the Mercy Seat:  The First Decatet,  was the inaugural program of the Langston Hughes Theater, in the Arturo Schomburg  Center for Research in Black Culture.  Precious Memories:  The Second Decatet, opened at the Abrons Arts Center.

Her works have  been performed on four continents, and have appeared in several anthologies and reviews, including:  The Best American Short Plays;  Black Drama in America;   Women Playwrights;  Perrine’s Literature;  The Ponder Review;  and in Terrain.Org.

Since 2017, Ms. Franklin’s “Race-Aid Project,” her body of One-Act plays, has been incubating, in the Ossie Davis/Ruby Dee Theater, where she is Resident Playwright.

The Race-Aid Project is a series of theater-based Community-Dialogues, highlighting the lives of key historical personalities who joined the conversation on Race, from Fourth Century Rome. The Project will resume presentations, in January, 2022, with “To Make Men Holy,” set against the backdrop of a young monk’s intestine-war, for love of Hypatia, the neo-Platonist scientist.  

“To Make Men Holy” is made possible with funds from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone;  the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council;  and with support  from local organizations and merchants:  the IMANI Group, Network for Children and Families;  the Aloft Hotel, and from Melba’s Restaurant. 

Ms. Franklin has been awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship;  a Eugene O’Neill Fellowship; an NEA Fellowship; and a John F. Kennedy New American Play Award:  a joint project of the American Express Company and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.