Royce Vavrek is a librettist and lyricist whose opera Angel’s Bone with composer Du Yun was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music. He made his HGO debut in 2015 with HGOco’s world premiere of O Columbia (composer Gregory Spears), followed by HGO world premiere The House Without a Christmas Tree in 2017 (composer Ricky Ian Gordon). He is known for his diverse collaborations with composers Missy Mazzoli (Song from the Uproar, Proving Up, The Listeners); Mikael Karlsson (Melancholia, Fanny & Alexander); David T. Little (Dog Days, Am I Born, JFK); Ricky Ian Gordon (27); Joshua Schmidt (Midwestern Gothic); Paola Prestini (The Hubble Cantata, Silent Light); Mary Kouyoumdjian (Adoration); and Luna Pearl Woolf (Jacqueline). Upcoming projects with Mazzoli include two grand operas: The Galloping Cure, an original work developed with Karen Russell and Tom Morris about the opioid epidemic, commissioned by Opera Ventures, as well as an adaptation of George Saunders’s Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo for the Metropolitan Opera. Vavrek is Artistic Director of Toronto’s experimental opera company Against the Grain. He is an alumnus of Concordia University (Montreal), NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, and American Lyric Theater’s Composer/Librettist Development Program.