One of Americas most successful new playwrights, Max Bush has written more than sixteen major plays since graduating from Grand Valley in 1972.  A number of his early works, in fact, received their world premiere at Grand Valley following his graduation, where he developed new scripts for several years with ensembles of faculty directors, designers, and others.  He earned his M.F.A. in Theatre from Michigan State in 1985 and embarked at that time on a profession as a playwright.

In 1995 Max received the nations highest prize for childrens playwriting, the Charlotte Chorpenning Cup. He was also the national winner of the American Alliance for Theatre in Educations Distinguished Play award in 1990 and 2002.  Occasionally working as a freelance stage director, Max finds his greatest excitement in directing his own plays and serving as dramaturg for productions of his newest work.  And he has produced commissioned plays for some of our nations most prestigious childrens theatre companies, including the Nashville Academy and Emmy Gifford theatres, the Hartford Childrens Theatre, Honolulu Youth Theatre and others. 

Max has also returned to his alma mater on more than one occasion in order to share his expertise with theatre students.  Over the past decade he has directed the student one-act play program, the Bard-to-Go and Greenshow theatre pieces for the Shakespeare Festival, and presented a number of workshops; and his play THE CRYSTAL received its premiere at GVSU in 1996. 

His plays have been widely published and produced both at home and abroad, especially in Canada and the first collected edition of his plays appeared in 1995.  His work is frequently seen on Grand Rapids area stages where he often receives commissions for new plays from the Michigan Council for the Arts, the Childrens Theatre Foundation of America, and other organizations. 

This year hes currently preparing a second volume of his complete plays for Meriwether Publishing; and he has also received a grant from the Michigan Womens Federation for a screenplay scheduled to be shot in Grand Rapids this December.

He and his wife Lynette live in Hamilton, far from the bustle of city life, in a dome house in the forest constructed over thirty years ago by an eccentric New Age GVSU professor from the old Thomas Jefferson College.  Max enjoys the down-to-earth qualities of Michigan life and the woodsy, rural solitude in Hamilton that provide the perfect natural surroundings for a writer.

And he especially enjoys the Michigan winters when he can raise a thirty-foot Christmas tree in the central area of his domed living room to celebrate the change of seasons in the Great Lakes.