Marilyn Jaye Lewis is an award-winning writer, editor, scriptwriter, playwright, songwriter, multi-media producer, and short subject film producer.

Author of 8 published novels and some 50+ published short stories, Marilyn is also theatrical writing partners with NYC-based African American transgender actress, Sandra Caldwell. Their play, The Guide to Being Fabulous, an original musical about Miss Caldwell’s life, was produced in November 2023 to rave reviews in Toronto, Canada by Soulpepper Theatre Company; with the Toronto Star selecting it as one of the Top 10 theatrical events for 2023.

Marilyn is also half of the writing-producing duo, Abstract Absurdity Productions, a micro-short comedy film production company based in Nice, France.

Prior to the pandemic, her original TV pilot, the racially charged Cleveland’s Burning, was in development with Bohemia Group Originals in Los Angeles. Scoring high on Franklin Leonard’s Black List, Cleveland’s Burning was also a Second Rounder at the Austin Film Festival, as well as a semi-finalist in L.A.’s Industry Insider TV Pilot competition.

Notably, her screenplay, Tell My Bones, the life story of Kentucky Outsider Artist, Helen LaFrance, was also a Second Rounder at the Austin Film Festival and went on to win the Best Voice of Color category at the Cleveland Independent Film Festival. During the pandemic, the theatrical adaptation of Tell My Bones, had a full Actors Equity Association online staged reading, co-produced by Blueprint Theater Project and New Heritage Theatre Group of Harlem.

In addition to Cleveland’s Burning, projects for television that were in development with Bohemia Group Originals in Los Angeles prior to the pandemic include The Tea Cozy Murder Club TV Pilot, and an online streaming limited series, Freak Parade, based on her award-winning erotic novel of the same name.

For the first 25 years of her professional literary career, Marilyn was known primarily in the international erotic arts community as not only a writer and editor, but also a publisher, an art curator, and a multi-media producer. Her award-winning erotic short stories and novella collections have been translated into many different languages, including French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian.

As editor, Lewis’s anthologies include Stirring up a Storm: Tales of the Sensual, the Sexual, and the Erotic (Running Press, NYC) — nominated for 3 Pushcart Prizes for Short Fiction and featuring short fiction by Selma Blair, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood, among many others.

She is the author of the critically acclaimed modern erotic fiction classic, Neptune & Surf. Called “a sensational debut” by The Guardian newspaper in London, Neptune & Surf was also selected as one of The Guardian’s Top Ten Summer Reads for 1999. Hailed by the American Book Review as “reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon A Time in America’”, Neptune & Surf has remained in print in the United States and Europe for 25 uninterrupted years, with all online rights currently secured by Hachette UK.

In the late 1990’s, when the Internet was in its infancy, as President of Marilyn’s Room, Inc. Marilyn was Executive Producer on numerous online spoken word recordings for fiction authors and poets, also producing groundbreaking live video and audio webcasts of spoken word performances in conjunction with Broadcast.com and Pseudo.com. As web designer and developer, Marilyn’s erotic multi-media sites won numerous awards, in particular inclusion in Playboy’s Online Hall of Fame for her groundbreaking erotic fiction website Other-Rooms.com.

She was the founder of the Erotic Authors Association, the first American organization to honor literary excellence in the erotic genre and was its Executive Director from 2001 – 2006. Members included such notable writers as E.L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Ms. Lewis’ collection of memoirs, Entangled Lives: Memoirs of 7 Top Erotica Writers (Alyson Books, Los Angeles), upon publication was a front-page feature on SMITHmagazine.net and was nominated for a 2007 Lambda Literary Award.

Her popular erotic romance novels include When Hearts Collide (2003) and When the Night Stood Still (2004) and were distributed exclusively by Barnes & Noble nationwide, both titles selling out of their print runs within a handful of months.

She was co-editor of the international best-selling art book, Erotic Photography (Constable UK). Her short stories, essays, and novellas have appeared in numerous anthologies in the United States and Europe and have won many citations and awards, including the New Century Writers Award and finalist in the William Faulkner Writing Competition, New Orleans.

In 1998, as head writer for ROMAntics, Inc. in New York City, her work was highlighted on HBO, won an AVN award for Best Adult CD ROM game of 1998 (DADAhouse), and received critical recognition in Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and other national media outlets.

In the 1980s, Marilyn Jaye Lewis (aka Marilyn J.) was a popular New York City-based singer-songwriter. Primarily known in Greenwich Village, two of her earliest compositions, produced on vinyl by Jack Hardy’s Speakeasy Co-Op, are now housed in the Smithsonian, on Folkways Records.