Parks, Suzan-Lori (1963-…), an American playwright, has gained recognition for her unconventional dramas about such topics as slavery, racism, urban poverty, and American history. Parks won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama for Topdog/Underdog (2001). She became the first African American female playwright to win the award. The play portrays the power struggles between two black brothers. The work, like Parks’s other dramas, won praise for its rich character portraits and brilliant use of poetic language.
Susan Lori Parks was born on May 10, 1964, in Fort Knox, Kentucky. She changed the spelling of her name to Suzan-Lori as an adult. Parks graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1985 with a B.A. degree, majoring in English and German. One of her most widely staged plays is In the Blood (1999). The drama tells the story of a homeless single mother struggling to raise her five children. Parks’s other plays include Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), The America Play (1990), and Venus (1996). In 2002 and 2003, Parks wrote one short play a day in a project she called “365 Plays/365 Days.” Almost 700 theaters in more than 30 American cities collaborated in presenting the plays over the course of a year in 2006 and 2007.
In 2003, Parks completed her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body. Parks’s serial drama Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) opened in 2014. It is a playful and philosophical work that follows a black slave during the American Civil War (1861-1865). She has also written radio plays, songs and screenplays.
