Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks is a multi-award-winning American writer/musician and the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Topdog/Underdog. The play's twentieth-anniversary Broadway revival won a Tony Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. In 2023, Parks had 3 world premieres: Sally & Tom (Steinberg New Play Award); Plays for the Plague Year (Drama Desk Award winner); and a musical adaptation of the film The Harder They Come (Outer Critics Circle Award winner.) Other notable theatre works include: The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (Tony Award, Best Revival of a Musical), Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical, White Noise, The Book of Grace, In the Blood, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play, Father Comes Home From The Wars Parts 1,2,&3 and Fucking A. Parks’ marathon “diary play” 365 Days/365 Plays — when she wrote a play a day for a year — was produced at more than 700 theaters worldwide, one of the largest collaborations in theater history. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, Parks’ novel Getting Mother’s Body is published by Random House. She also writes for the screen — most recently, for the film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and as the showrunner/exec. producer/head writer for the TV show Genius: Aretha. In 2023 Parks was named among “TIME MAGAZINE’S 100”, and has received innumerable other accolades. In November 2022, Parks was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. She is Writer in Residence of the Public Theater, a professor at NYU, and an alumna of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College where she studied creative writing with James Baldwin, who encouraged Parks to begin writing for the theatre. In her spare time, Parks also writes songs and fronts her band Sula and The Joyful Noise.