Keli Goff

As a playwright, Keli often explores the way topics like race, class, gender or politics, can impact our closest relationships. The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls, a collection of heartbreaking and humorous monologues and scenes chronicling the complicated relationship Black women often have with their hair, premiered at Baltimore Center Stage (via an online production, due to the pandemic) in March 2021 and has been performed at theaters around America, ever since. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. one of the world's leading scholars of African American culture called The Glorious World... "powerful and deeply moving," while famed feminist activist Gloria Steinem hailed it as a "celebration of the human condition." Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage declared it "a funny, heartbreaking and ultimately healing play about the role hair plays in unbraiding, shaping and celebrating our Black identity.”

In 2020 Keli’s mini-play, The Birds & the Bees… was commissioned by The State Theatre of New Jersey for inclusion in the “Play at Home” initiative, which provides access to theatrical opportunities for families during the pandemic.

The Road Theatre Company selected Keli’s play The Kitchen, for inclusion in its 2019 Summer Playwrights Festival. Attempting to reclaim the often grotesque caricature of Black maids in popular culture, The Kitchen explores what happens to the burgeoning friendship between Alma, an upper class White woman, and Docie, her maid, following a racially charged sexual assault in the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement.

A lifelong theater fan, Keli's career as a playwright began when she submitted her very first play Redeemed to the legendary Public Theater of New York. The story of what happens to the relationship of a homophobic pastor and his daughter when she decides to work on the campaign of an openly gay congressional candidate, Redeemed, earned Keli one of the Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group Fellowships. During this two-year residency, she developed her second play, The Color of Trust, (formerly known as The Black Friend) which explores the impact of a racial discrimination lawsuit on lifelong friends who happen to be of different races. After enjoying two sold out staged readings during The Public Theater’s 2015 Spotlight Series, where it starred Tony nominee Condola Rashad, The Color of Trust was selected for Labyrinth Theater's Up Next Series, which culminated in a staged reading in November 2016. That same year it was also designated a semi-finalist for The Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship and a finalist for the AracaWorks reading series.

In 2014 Redeemed was included in the Genesis Festival of New Plays at Crossroads Theater and in 2015 it was selected as a finalist for The Premiere Stages Playwriting Festival, where critically acclaimed actor Frankie Faison starred in the lead role. As of 2024 Keli continues to develop new work for the stage, including the play Other People’s Children, which chronicles the devastating fallout following a tragedy at a low-income school.