During this period, she also embarked on an ambitious project to write one play every day for a year, no matter where she was or what she was doing. She published her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body, in 2003, and she wrote a musical based on the life of musician Ray Charles in 2007. 2011), a blues musician who formerly played with the famous Muddy Water Blues Band, and began teaching at the California Institute for the Arts and expanding into other genres. Around this time, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband Paul Oscher (div.

She became a household name, however, only with the 2002 Broadway production of her play Topdog/Underdog, which won her a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur “genius” grant, and was also named the best American play written between 19 by the New York Times. Over the next decade, Parks found moderate success by collaborating with the New York Public Theater on a series of plays, including The America Play, that explored and unraveled historical, scientific, and stereotypical representations of blackness. In 1987, she put on her first play, Betting on the Dust Commander, in a Lower East Side bar-her friend Laurie Carlos directed, and Parks recalls that her audience consisted of “my dad, my mom, and my sister, and one of the homeless guys from the neighborhood.” But her second work, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, was a hit and got Parks labeled as a rising star. After graduating, Parks took Baldwin's advice and moved to London to study acting for a year, and then went to New York and started writing plays while working odd jobs. At Mount Holyoke, Parks took a class with the illustrious writer James Baldwin, who called her “an utterly astounding and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time,” and also convinced her to try writing plays. After graduating from high school in Maryland, she went to college at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she studied English and German Literature. states-including her mother’s native Texas-and briefly in Germany, as the daughter of an Army officer.

One of the most decorated living American playwrights, Suzan-Lori Parks was born in Kentucky but grew up in six different U.S.

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