W. Kamau Bell to Host Writers Guild Awards East Coast Ceremony

New York City – Comedian W. Kamau Bell will host the 66th Annual Writers Guild Awards New York Ceremony. The awards will be held on Saturday, February 1, 2014 at the Edison Ballroom in New York City. Award presenters to be announced.

W. Kamau Bell was most recently the host of the FXX television series Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, which was nominated for “Best Talk Series” at the 2012 NAACP Image Awards and heralded by the New York Times as “the most promising new talent in political comedy in many years.” In 2010, Kamau released his second stand up album, Face Full of Flour, which was named one of the Top 10 Best Comedy Albums of the year by iTunes and Punchline Magazine. In 2007 he developed his one-man show The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About An Hour, which was a comedy pick in The Guardian during its 2011 run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a Time Out NY critic’s pick in the 2010 NY Comedy Festival, and played to sold-out audiences in the 2009 NY International Fringe Festival. Kamau co-hosts the podcast The Field Negro’s Guide to Arts & Culture with Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, and sits on the board of The Applied Research Center, a racial justice think tank and home for media and activism. When approached to host the annual awards ceremony, Bell remarked, “I’m excited to host the WGA Awards, mostly because I assume it will allow me to keep my health insurance.”

The 66th Annual Writers Guild Awards East coast ceremony is supported this year by Screencraft.

The 2014 Writers Guild Awards will be held on Saturday, February 1, 2014, simultaneously at the Edison Ballroom in New York City and the JW Marriott in Los Angeles, CA.

For more information about the 2014 Writers Guild Awards, please visit www.wgaeast.org. For information on the Los Angeles event visit www.wga.org. For media inquiries about the 2014 Writers Guild Awards New York show, please contact Dana Weissman at dweissman@wgaeast.org or visit online at: www.wgaeast.org.

The Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) is a labor union representing writers in motion pictures, television, cable, digital media, and broadcast news. The Guild negotiates and administers contracts that protect the creative and economic rights of their members; conducts programs, seminars, and events on issues of interest to writers; and presents writers’ views to various bodies of government.