RISING is the Winner of the Mario-Fratti- Fred Newman International Playwriting Contest, Castillo Theatre, New York City. This educational, historical drama tells the true story of Charlotte Forten, a young African American Northern schoolteacher recruited by Quaker abolitionists to go behind the Confederate line to begin a night class for freed enslaved women designated contraband by the Union. Based on letters, journals, and diaries written from Beaufort, Port Royal, and St. Helena during the Civil War, this is the story of Americans, black and white, discovering the cost of freedom.