Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks (born May 10, 1963, Fort Knox, Kentucky, U.S.) is an American playwright who was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama (for Topdog/Underdog).

Parks, who was writing stories at age five, had a peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a military officer. She attended Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts (B.A. [cum laude], 1985), where James Baldwin, who taught a writing class there, encouraged her to try playwriting. She wrote her first play, The Sinner’s Place (produced 1984), while still in school. She won Obie Awards for her third play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (produced 1989), and for her eighth, Venus (produced 1996), about a South African Khoisan woman taken to England as a sideshow attraction. With Topdog/Underdog (produced 2001), Parks evoked the complexities of the African American experience through the fraught relationship between two brothers. In 2002 the play became her first to be staged on Broadway, and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Parks’s other plays included The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (produced 1990); The America Play (produced 1994), about a man obsessed with Abraham Lincoln; In the Blood (produced 1999), which updates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; and The Book of Grace (produced 2010), a biblically inflected examination of the familial relations of a racist patriarch. In 2006–07 Parks oversaw a project that coordinated performances across the United States of the plays she had written one per day over the course of a year, in 2002–03 (collected as 365 Days/365 Plays [2006]).

Parks later adapted the book of George and Ira Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess for a musical theatre production that premiered on Broadway in 2012. Another critically acclaimed play, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (produced 2014), was based on Homer’s Odyssey and set during the American Civil War. It contained the first three segments of a projected nine-part epic drama. Race and friendship are explored in White Noise (produced 2019), in which a struggling African American artist and victim of police brutality asks his white friend to buy him as his personal slave, for 40 days.

Parks wrote radio plays (Pickling [1990]) and teleplays (Their Eyes Were Watching God [2005], an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel). She also penned several screenplays, including Girl 6 (1996); Native Son (2019), based on Richard Wright’s novel; and The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021), adapted from a book by Johann Hari. Parks’s first novel, Getting Mother’s Body, was published in 2003.

Her writing has been praised for its wild poetry, its irreverence, its humour, and its concurrent profundity. She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2001 and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2015. Three years later she won the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award.