Dean Poynor has been on campus all day, but he isn't going anywhere. In a shared office of Carnegie Mellon's Purnell Center for the Arts, the master of fine arts student in dramatic writing sits and lets his imagination fill the page.

Earlier, the theatre department workshopped Poynor's thesis play, Bellhammer, about Christian professional wrestlers who theatrically portray Bible lessons. During the reading, an actor asked a question about his character's motivation. Poynor found the moment "terrifying and stimulating," because he wasn't completely sure himself. So now his pen presses page, filling in gaps, reworking the character, creating an answer to the question.

Poynor says he realizes that writing, in essence, is "all on spec." There are no guarantees that a playwright's interests, vision, hard work, and time will equate to financial success, so he is cautious, diligent, and not too proud for rewrites, even after earning:

  • $25,000 first prize in the Sloan Screenwriting Competition for his screenplay, Salk, which chronicles Jonas Salk's quest to find a polio vaccine. The competition is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

  • $10,000 for winning Jacksonville University's third annual Helford Prize, which is open to U.S. residents. He won for his play Losing Sleep, which is the story of a man who works nights in a sleep lab and is trying to piece together the lost fragments of his life.

  • $1,500 from the 22nd annual Trustus Playwrights' Festival, one of America's longest-running play festivals. Poynor's winning play, Paradise Key, is an alternate history of discovering the polio vaccine.

Despite the recognition, Poynor writes and rewrites until the dialogue sounds real, until the characters develop naturally, until it all just works. When ideas cease to flow, he leaves the office, walks to his car, and drives to the hill on Technology Drive. He steps out to stand among the trees, as he often does, and gazes at an orange, sun-swept skyline of Oakland. There, he takes time to simply breathe, not forgetting that every day is "all on spec."
—Kevin Trobaugh