Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is a multi-award-winning writer and musician. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Topdog/Underdog which also recently won the 2023 Tony Award for best revival. Parks is the book writer for the Tony award-winning revival The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (Tony award, best revival 2012) and her other musicals include the stage adaptation and original songs of the Jamaican Jimmy Cliff film The Harder They Come, (Outer Critics Circle Award, 2023) currently set to open at Stratford East Theatre in London.
Parks’ other plays include: Sally & Tom (2024), Plays for the Plague Year (Drama Desk Award, Best Music, 2023) Father Comes Home From The Wars (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2015), Fucking A, The America Play, In The Blood (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2000), The Death Of The Last Black Man In The Whole Entire World, AKA The Negro Book Of The Dead, and Imperceptible Mutabilities In the Third Kingdom (OBIE Award, Best New American Play, 1990). Parks’ first marathon-writing “micro diary plays” 365 Days/365 Plays were produced worldwide in what was the largest grassroots collaborative theatre project to date.
She is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she is a novelist: Getting Mother’s Body (Random House), and she is a screenwriter: Girl 6, (dir. Spike Lee) The United States vs Billie Holiday (dir. Lee Daniels). Also for the screen she’s adapted Richard Wright’s Native Son, (for HBO) and Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (ABC, Oprah Winfrey Presents) and Parks served as the Executive Producer and Showrunner of Genius, Season 3: Aretha Franklin (for Disney/Hulu).
Additionally, Parks writes songs and fronts her band “SLP & The Joyful Noise” creating music for her comedic-medicine- show, The Tune Up which world-premiered at Little Island last summer and is currently enjoying a residency at Lincoln Center. For the past several years Parks has served as Writer In Residence of The Public Theatre. Before joining the faculty at Tisch, Parks was the inaugural head of Cal Arts’ Writing For Performance Program and her teaching extends beyond the academy -- for the past 15 years she has been running Watch Me Work, weekly creativity coaching sessions, online, free of charge and welcoming to creatives of all disciplines and levels of experience. Hailed by The New York Times as “our most Shakespearian playwright,” Parks is most grateful to have studied creative writing with James Baldwin, who greatly encouraged her work.