Suzan-Lori Parks
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Suzan-Lori Parks (1964 - ) is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recepient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002.
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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. 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].
Career
Parks' first play, The Sinner's Place filled her degree requirements, but in a 2000 interview by Shawn-Marie Garrett for American Theatre, Parks explained that the Mount Holyoke Theatre department refused to stage it, saying, "You can't put dirt on stage! That's not a play!"
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.
Other 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).
Parks wrote her first screenplay for Girl 6, a 1996 film directed by Spike Lee (which he allegedly proposed to Parks with the question "Can you write about phone sex?"). She later wrote the teleplay for the 2005 film Their Eyes Were Watching God based upon the novel by Zora Neale Hurston. It was produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions, the company which is currently producing (with Miramax), The Great Debaters, a forthcoming 2006 film directed by Denzel Washington and with a screenplay by Parks and Robert Eisele.
In addition, Parks is the author of the novel Getting Mother's Body.
Works
Plays
- Topdog/Underdog (2001)
- Fucking A (2000)
- In The Blood (1999)
- Venus (1996)
- The America Play (1994)
- Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992)
- The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990)
- Betting on the Dust Commander (1990)
- Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989)
- The Sinner's Place (1984)
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
Plays for radio
- Locomotive (1991)
- Third Kingdom (1990)
- Pickling (1990)
Screenplays/teleplays
- The Great Debaters (forthcoming, 2006)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005)
- Girl 6 (1996)
Books
Essays and speeches
- Suzan-Lori Parks's Aha! Moment - oprah.com
- Suzan-Lori Parks Commencement Speech to the Mount Holyoke College Class of 2001 Held on May 27, 2001
Awards
Winner:
- 2002 Pulitzer Prize Drama for Topdog/Underdog
- 2001 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
- 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship Playwriting
- 1995 - 1996 Obie Award Playwriting: Venus
- 1992 Whiting Writers' Award
- 1989 - 1990 Obie Award Best New American Play: Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom
Nominations:
- 2000 Pulitzer Prize Drama for In The Blood
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 [2].