Suzan-Lori Parks

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Suzan-Lori Parks
Born: 1964
Occupation(s): Playwright
Nationality: United States
Influences: James Baldwin
Leah Blatt Glasser
Mary McHenry
Wendy Wasserstein

Suzan-Lori Parks (1964 - ) is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.

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[edit] Background

Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky and went to high school in West Germany. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College in 1985 with a B.A. in English and German literature.

[edit] Influences

While a student at Mount Holyoke, Parks took a writing class with Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin. At his behest, she began to write plays [1].

Parks would credit Mount Holyoke later in life for her success. She said in a newspaper interview that she was inspired by Wendy Wasserstein, a 1971 Mount Holyoke graduate who won the Pulitzer in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles. "Mount Holyoke women rule, baby," Parks was quoted as saying. "Just knowing someone else is out there doing something good and cool and gets some recognition for it. I joke about it. There's something in the water."[2]. She also credited her former Mount Holyoke professors Mary McHenry and Leah Blatt Glasser with her success. [3]

[edit] Career

[edit] Screenwriter

As a screenwriter, Parks has worked with important figures in the American film industry. Her first screenplay was for Spike Lee's 1996 film, Girl 6. She later worked in conjunction with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions on two films, Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) and The Great Debaters, a forthcoming 2008 film directed by Denzel Washington and with a screenplay by Parks and Robert Eisele.

[edit] Playwright

Her plays include The America Play (the opening scene of which inspired Topdog/Underdog), Venus (about Saartjie Baartman), In The Blood and Fucking A (which are both a retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter).

From November 2002 to November 2003, Parks wrote a short play each day for a year. The result of this process is the "365 Days/365 Plays" series (featuring premieres of various of the 365 plays around the United States in 2006 and 2007). According to an article in the New York Times[1], "subject matter for the plays, most only a few pages long, ranges from deities to soldiers to what Ms. Parks saw out of her plane window."

[edit] Pulitzer Prize

Her 2001 play, Topdog/Underdog (a play about family identity, fraternal interdependence, and the struggles of everyday African American life), won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002.

[edit] Novelist

Parks is the author of the novel Getting Mother's Body.

[edit] Works

[edit] Plays

[edit] Collections

  • Red Letter Plays (Fucking A and In The Blood), 2000
  • The American Play and Other Works (The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The America Play, Betting on the Dust Commander, Pickling , and Devotees in the Garden of Love), 1994

[edit] Plays for radio

  • Locomotive (1991)
  • Third Kingdom (1990)
  • Pickling (1990)

[edit] Screenplays/teleplays

[edit] Books

  • Getting Mother's Body: A Novel (2003)

[edit] Essays and speeches

[edit] Awards

Winner:

Nominations:

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Robertson, Campbell. "What do you get if you write a play a day? A lot of premieres." New York Times, November 10, 2006.

[edit] References

  • Baym, Nina (ed.) "Suzan-Lori Parks." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th edition, Vol. E. New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 2003: 2606-2607 [4].
  • Collins, Ken and Victor Wishna. "Suzan-Lori Parks." In In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights. New York: Umbrage Editions, 2006: 186-189.

[edit] External links

Biographies:

Articles:

Excerpts:

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