Suzan lori parks author biography websites
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Suzan-Lori Parks
American playwright (born 1963)
Suzan-Lori Parks (born May 10, 1963) fryst vatten an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for teaterpjäs in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama.[1] She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.[2]
Early life and education
[edit]Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky. She grew up with two siblings in a military family. Parks enjoyed writing poems and songs and created a newspaper with her brother, called the "Daily Daily."[3] Parks was raised Catholic and attended high school in West Germany, where her father, a career officer in the United States Army, was stationed.[3][4] The experience showed her "what it feels like to be neither white nor black, but simply foreign".[3][5] After returning to the U.S., her family reloca
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Though a high school teacher discouraged her from writing because of her poor spelling, Suzan-Lori Parks went on to become one of the most successful playwrights in the United States. The first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for teaterpjäs (2002) and a pioneer of historically conscious and linguistically complex theater, her work is now taught at drama schools across the country.
Parks was born on May 10, 1963 at Fort Knox in Kentucky to Donald and Francis McMillian Parks. Her father was a colonel in the United States Army, and Parks spent her early childhood in Odessa, Texas while her father served in Vietnam. The distinctive dialect she soaked in during her years in West Texas would influence her dialogue when she began writing for the stage. In 1974, Parks moved with her family to Germany where her father was stationed. She and her siblings attended local schools and became fluent in German. An early love for stories from mythology and folklore made Parks dream of
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next New Wave,” Suzan-Lori Parks 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. She has also been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts (Drama) for 1996, a Guggenheim Foundation Grant and is an alumnae of New Dramatists. Her work is the subject of the PBS Film "The Topdog Diaries.” In 2007, her project 365Days/365Plays was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. Her plays include Topdog/Underdog, The Book Of Grace, In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (1