Named one of TIME
magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next New Wave,”
Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most exciting and acclaimed playwrights
in American drama today. She is the first African American woman
to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for the Broadway hit
Topdog/Underdog
and is a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, among
her many other honors. Parks has said of her presentations:
“My lectures aren’t your typical writer-behind-the-podium
evening – audiences call them ‘the Suzan-Lori Parks
show.’” Her talks are part performance, part storytelling
– always high energy, with an inspired sense of humor.
In 2007 her project 365
Plays/365 Days was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide,
creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater
history. Her numerous plays include Topdog/Underdog,
In
the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus
(1996 OBIE Award), The
Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible
Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award for Best
New American Play), and The
America Play. Her first feature-length screenplay was Girl
6 written for Spike Lee. She’s also written screenplays
for Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, and adapted Zora Neale Hurston’s
classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God which starred
Halle Barry and premiered on ABC’s Oprah Winfrey Presents.
Parks is co-author of the screenplay for The Great Debaters,
starring Denzel Washington (December 2007 release). Park’s
well-reviewed first novel Getting
Mother's Body (Random House, 2003) is set in the west Texas
of her youth and follows the scrappy Beede family as they embark
on a riotous road trip in hopes of recovering a fortune of jewels
– rumored to be buried with a long-dead relative. She
is the author of Ray Charles Live!, a musical based on
the life of Ray Charles that premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse.
In 2008, Parks was named the “Writer in Residence”
at New York’s Public Theater, a position she will hold
for three years, actively participating in the artistic community
of the Public Theater. Parks will direct the Broadway revival
of August Wilson’s Fences in 2009.
In November 2008 Suzan-Lori
Parks became the first recipient of the master writer chair
at the Public Theater, a three-year residency in which she will
also be a visiting arts professor in dramatic writing at New
York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Parks has
also taught at California Institute of the Arts and Yale School
of Drama. Her play Snake will premiere during the 2009-10
season at the Public Theatre.
Holding honorary
doctorates from Brown University, among others, Suzan-Lori credits
her writing teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, for starting
her on the path of playwrighting. One of the first to recognize
Parks’ writing skills, Mr. Baldwin declared Parks “an
astonishing and beautiful creature who may become one of the
most valuable artists of our time.”
•••
“ Her dislocating stage
devices, stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic
images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous.”
