Quiara Alegría Hudes
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a writer, barrio feminist, and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work’s exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. They include a Pulitzer-winning drama, Water By the Spoonful, and a Tony-winning Broadway musical, In the Heights (co-authored with Lin-Manuel Miranda). Her screenplay adaptation of In the Heights opens in movie theaters nationwide this June.
Along with her cousin and a dedicated circle of volunteers, Hudes founded and runs Emancipated Stories, a collection of pages written by people who have been or remain incarcerated.
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Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author.
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She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off- -
Katori Hall
Katori Hall (born May 10, 1981) is an American playwright, journalist, and actress from Memphis, Tennessee.
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Hall graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing. She was awarded top departmental honors from the university's Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). In 2005, she graduated from the American Repertory Theater's Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting, and graduated from the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program in 2009.
Her awards include a Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Lark Play Development Center Playwrights of New York (PONY) Fellowship, Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship, two Lec -
Stephen Adly Guirgis
Stephen Adly Guirgis is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He is a member and a former co-artistic director of New York City's LAByrinth Theater Company. His plays have been produced both Off-Broadway and on Broadway, as well as in the UK. His play Between Riverside and Crazy won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Donald Margulies
Born in Brooklyn in 1954, Donald Margulies grew up in Trump Village, a Coney Island housing project built by Donald Trump's father. Margulies was exposed early to the theatre. His father, a wallpaper salesman, played show tunes on the family hi-fi and, despite a limited income, often took his children to Manhattan to attend Broadway plays and musicals.
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Margulies studied visual arts at the Pratt Institute before transferring to State University of New York to pursue a degree in playwriting. During the early 80s, he collaborated with Joseph Papp, and his first Off-Broadway play, Found a Peanut, was produced at the Public Theatre. In 1983, he moved with his wife to New Haven, Connecticut, so that she could attend Yale Medical School.
In 1992, Ma -
Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. She is the daughter of the noted author Anita Desai.
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Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), gained accolades from notable figures including Salman Rushdie, and went on to receive the Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. -
Elizabeth Nunez
Elizabeth Nunez was a Trinidadian-American novelist academic who was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College, New York City.
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Her novels have won a number of awards: Prospero's Daughter received The New York Times Editors' Choice and 2006 Novel of the Year from Black Issues Book Review, Bruised Hibiscus won the 2001 American Book Award, and Beyond the Limbo Silence won the 1999 Independent Publishers Book Award. In addition, Nunez was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Discretion; Boundaries was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice and nominated for a 2012 NAACP Image Award; and Anna In-Between was selected for the 2010 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence as well as a New York Time -
Jackie Sibblies Drury
Jackie Sibblies Drury is an American playwright. A native of Plainfield, New Jersey, she is a graduate of Yale and Brown University MFA playwriting program, receiving the David Wickham Prize in Playwriting.
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
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Margaret Edson
Margaret Edson was born in Washington, DC in 1961. She earned degrees in history and literature, and she has been a public school teacher since 1992. Her play Wit won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. The play has received hundreds of productions in dozens of languages, and the HBO version won the Emmy Award for best film in 2001. She lives with her family in Atlanta and teaches sixth-grade social studies at Inman Middle School.
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Rita Leganski
Rita Leganski holds an MA in writing and publishing and a BA in literary studies and creative writing from DePaul University. She teaches a writing workshop at DePaul's School for New Learning and was a recipient of the Arthur Weinberg Memorial Prize for a work of historical fiction.
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Luis Valdez
Luis Valdez is an American playwright, writer and film director.
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He is regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the United States. -
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.
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McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times P -
Jade Song
Jade Song is a writer and artist who enjoys looking at paintings and telling her friends she loves them. Song's second novel, I Love You Don’t Die, will be published on March 17, 2026; their debut short story collection, Ox Ghost Snake Demon, is forthcoming in 2027.
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Lauded as "visionary and disturbing," Song's debut novel Chlorine was awarded the ALA Alex Award and the Writer's Center First Novel Prize, selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and has been translated into four languages. Song has received support and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Black List, which selected her adapted screenplay of Chlorine for its annual Writers Lab. She is based in Brooklyn, where they pole dance and live with too many books. The -
Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often deals with the lives of marginalized people. She is a professor of Playwriting at Columbia University. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice; the first in 2009 for Ruined, and the second in 2017 for Sweat.
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Ayad Akhtar
Ayad Akhtar is a playwright, novelist, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), published in over 20 languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The
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August Wilson
American playwright August Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for Fences in 1985 and for The Piano Lesson in 1987.
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His literary legacy embraces the ten series and received twice for drama for The Pittsburgh Cycle . Each depicted the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience, set in different decade of the 20th century.
Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, in the hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bore Frederick August Kittel, Junior, the fourth of six children, to Frederick August Kittel, Senior, a German immigrant baker. From North Carolina, maternal grandmother of Wilson earlier sought a better life and walked to Pennsylvania. After his fifth year, his mother raised the childr -
Alfred Uhry
Alfred Uhry was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His book for the musical version of Eudora Welty's The Robber Bridegroom was Tony nominated in 1976. Driving Miss Daisy won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Last Night of Ballyhoo and his book for the musical Parade won Tony Awards. In 2006 his play Without Walls, starring Laurence Fishburne, opened in Los Angeles, and Edgardo Mine opened at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. He has also written the book for Lovemusik, which opened on Broadway in May 2007. Screenplays include Mystic Pizza, Rich in Love, and I'll Take Virginia.
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Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. Odets was born in Philadelphia to Louis Odets (born Gorodetsky) and Pearl Geisinger, Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high school after two years to become an actor. In 1931, he became a founding member of the Group Theatre, a highly influential New York theatre company that utilized an acting technique new to the United States. This technique was based on the system devised by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski. It was further developed by Group Theatre director Lee Strasberg and became known as The Method or Method Acting. Odets eventually
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Eliana Ramage
Eliana Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has been a Lambda Literary fellow and writer-in-residence, a Harpo Foundation Native American Residency Fellow at Vermont Studio Center, a Tin House Scholar, and a Kimmel Harding Nelson resident. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she lives in Nashville with her family.
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Eric Silberstein
Eric Silberstein is a software engineer, company founder, and novelist. After receiving his bachelor's in computer science from Harvard, he founded Idiom Technologies, a pioneer in translation management software. He then went on to co-found and serve as CEO of TrialNetworks, a software platform to accelerate medical research. His first novel, The Insecure Mind of Sergei Kraev, was published in 2021, and his second novel, In Berlin, will be released on August 5, 2025. Eric enjoys creating, learning, early morning swims, and writing at his local library.
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Megha Majumdar
MEGHA MAJUMDAR is the author of the forthcoming novel A Guardian and a Thief. Her first book, the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. In India, it won a Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. Her work has been supported by the Whiting, Civitella Ranieri, and Hawthornden foundations. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, she now lives in New York.
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Maria Reva
MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.
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Paula Saunders
Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She danced as an apprentice with the Harkness Ballet in New York City, under David Howard. She is a graduate of Barnard College, as well as the Syracuse creative writing program, and was awarded a post-graduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany under then-Schweitzer Chair, Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.
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Oyinkan Braithwaite
OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE is a graduate of Creative Writing and Law from Kingston University. Following her degree, she worked as an assistant editor at Kachifo, a Nigerian publishing house, and has been freelancing as a writer and editor since. In 2014, she was shortlisted as a top-ten spoken-word artist in the Eko Poetry Slam, and in 2016 she was a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.
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Jason Mott
Jason Mott lives in southeastern North Carolina. He has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction has appeared in various journals such as Prick of the Spindle, The Thomas Wolfe Review, The Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets, Measure and Chautauqua. He was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize award and Entertainment Weekly listed him as one of their 10 “New Hollywood: Next Wave” people to watch.
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He is the author of two poetry collections: We Call This Thing Between Us Love and “…hide behind me…” The Returned is his first novel.
The Returned has been optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, in association with Brillstein Entertainment and ABC. It will air -
David Ball
David Ball has been to 60 countries on six continents. He has lived and worked in various parts of Africa. In the course of researching his novel Empires of Sand, he crossed the Sahara desert four times, and got lost there only once. Research trips for other novels have taken him to China, Istanbul, Algeria, and Malta - a little island where so far he hasn't gotten lost at all.
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A former pilot, sarcophagus maker, and businessman, David has driven a taxi in New York City and built a road in West Africa. He installed telecommunications equipment in Cameroun and explored the Andes in a Volkswagen bus. He has renovated old Victorian houses in Denver and pumped gasoline in the Grand Tetons.
He has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia Unive -
Annie Baker
Baker grew up in Amherst, Mass., and graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College.
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Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award f -
Ed Park
I'm the author of the forthcoming story collection AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS (July 2025)—preorder it now!
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My novel SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS (2023) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature.
My debut novel, PERSONAL DAYS (2008), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.
THREE TENSES, my memoir, will be out next year.
What else? I'm a founding editor of THE BELIEVER, and I've written for The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Baffler, and many other places. (Check out ed-park.com or https://linktr.ee/edpark for some -
Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often deals with the lives of marginalized people. She is a professor of Playwriting at Columbia University. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice; the first in 2009 for Ruined, and the second in 2017 for Sweat.
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Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts is an American playwright and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County.
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Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts, of Where The Heart Is and The Honk And Holler Opening Soon fame, and the late college professor and actor Dennis Letts. His brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer. He also has a brother Dana. Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma and graduated from Durant High School in the early 1980s. He moved to Dallas, where he waited tables and worked in telemarketing while starting as an actor. He acted in Jerry Flemmons' O Dammit!, which was part of a new playwrights series sponsored by Southern Methodist University.
Letts moved to Chicago at the ag -
Susan Glaspell
Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 27, 1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer and poet. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, one of the most important collaboratives in the development of modern drama in the United States. She also served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project.
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Her novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, to understanding 'life' in its complexity. Though realism was the medium of her fiction, she was also greatly interested in philosophy and religion. Many of her characters make principled stands.
As part of the Provincetown Players, she arranged for the -
Lily King
Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English Literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and Creative Writing at several universities and high schools in this country and abroad. Lily's new novel, Euphoria, was released in June 2014. It has drawn significant acclaim so far, being named an Amazon Book of the Month, on the Indie Next List, and hitting numerous summer reading lists from The Boston Globe to O Magazine and USA Today. Reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, Emily Eakin called Euphoria, “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace.”
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Lily -
David Auburn
David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Paula Vogel
Paula Vogel is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.
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Vogel was born in Washington, D.C. to Donald Stephen Vogel, an advertising executive, and Phyllis Rita Bremerman, a secretary for United States Postal Service Training and Development Center. She is a graduate of The Catholic University of America (1974, B.A.) and Cornell University (1976, M.A.). Vogel also attended Bryn Mawr College from 1969 to 1970 and 1971 to 1972.
A productive playwright since the late 1970s, Vogel first came to national prominence with her AIDS-related seriocomedy The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie award for Best Play in 1992. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-w -
John Patrick Shanley
John Patrick Shanley was born in The Bronx, New York City, to a telephone operator mother and a meat-packer father. He is a graduate of New York University, and is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre.
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For his script for the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Shanley won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
In 1990, Shanley directed his script of Joe Versus the Volcano. Shanley also wrote two songs for the movie: "Marooned Without You" and "The Cowboy Song."
In 2004 Shanley was inducted into the Bronx Walk of Fame.
In 2005, Shanley's play Doubt: A Parable was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Drama Desk Award and Tony Award for Best Play. Dou -
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
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Euripides
Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
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Eur -
Eric Silberstein
Eric Silberstein is a software engineer, company founder, and novelist. After receiving his bachelor's in computer science from Harvard, he founded Idiom Technologies, a pioneer in translation management software. He then went on to co-found and serve as CEO of TrialNetworks, a software platform to accelerate medical research. His first novel, The Insecure Mind of Sergei Kraev, was published in 2021, and his second novel, In Berlin, will be released on August 5, 2025. Eric enjoys creating, learning, early morning swims, and writing at his local library.
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Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts is an American playwright and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County.
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Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts, of Where The Heart Is and The Honk And Holler Opening Soon fame, and the late college professor and actor Dennis Letts. His brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer. He also has a brother Dana. Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma and graduated from Durant High School in the early 1980s. He moved to Dallas, where he waited tables and worked in telemarketing while starting as an actor. He acted in Jerry Flemmons' O Dammit!, which was part of a new playwrights series sponsored by Southern Methodist University.
Letts moved to Chicago at the ag -
Brando Skyhorse
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Brando Skyhorse is the author of the memoir "Take This Man" to be published by Simon and Schuster on June 3rd, 2014.
Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 Pen/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The book was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. He has been awarded fellowships at Ucross and Can Serrat, Spain. Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine. He is the 2014 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-In-Washington at George Washington University.
Find out more at brandoskyhorse.com -
Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl (born 1974) is an American playwright. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career.
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Originally, she intended to be a poet. However, after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001), she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. Her roots in poetry can be seen in the way she uses language in her plays. She also did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford.
In September 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated: "Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York City. Playwright -
Anthony Shaffer
This profile is for the British playwright. For the American military officer, see Anthony Shaffer.
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Anthony Shaffer is best-known as the author of the mystery-thriller play Sleuth, in addition to other plays and screenplays involving crime and mystery themes. His identical twin brother, Peter Shaffer, was also a playwright. -
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José Rivera
José Rivera is a recipient of two Obie Awards for playwriting for Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, which were both produced by The Public Theater in New York. His plays, Cloud Tectonics (Playwrights Horizons and Goodman Theatre), Boleros for the Disenchanted (Yale Repertory Theatre and Goodman Theatre), Sueño (Manhattan Class Company), Sonnets for an Old Century (The Barrow Group), School of the Americas (The Public Theater), Massacre (Sing to Your Children) (Rattlestick and Goodman Theatre), Brainpeople (ACT, San Francisco), Adoration of the Old Woman (INTAR) and The House of Ramon Iglesia (Ensemble Studio Theatre), have been produced across the country and around the world. He is currently working on The Last Book of H
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Nilo Cruz
Cruz'z interest in theater began with acting and directing in the early 1980s. He studied theater first at Miami-Dade Community College, later moving to New York City, where Cruz studied under fellow Cuban María Irene Fornés. Fornes recommended Cruz to Paula Vogel who was teaching at Brown University where he would later receive his M.F.A. in 1994.
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In 2001, Cruz served as the playwright-in-residence for the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he wrote Anna in the Tropics. Rafael de Acha, produced and directed the world premier performance of Anna in the Tropics, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer and the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. A year later it received its Broadway premiere with Jimmy Smits in the lead role.
Some of the theatres -
Matthew López
American playwright, known for The Whipping Man and The Inheritance.
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Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She is a product of the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in the South Bronx. She attended the New York City public school system and received her academic degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo and Queens College-City University of New York. As a child she was sent to live with her grandparents in Puerto Rico where she was introduced to the culture of rural Puerto Rico, including the storytelling that came naturally to the women in her family, especially the older women. Much of her work is based on her experiences during this time. Dahlma taught creative writing and language and literature in the New York City public school system before
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Ian Shaw
Dr. Ian Shaw (born 1961) is an Egyptologist and Reader in Egyptian archaeology at the University of Liverpool.
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His field work was largely focused in el-Amarna, but in recent times, he has done extensive excavations of mining and quarrying sites from many different Ancient Egyptian periods. He primarily focuses his recent work on methods and mechanics of Egyptian craftsmen and laborers. However, he has produced several works regarding ancient Egyptian warfare; a topic that had long been ignored or only briefly commented on by other researchers.
Besides writing original books, he also has edited several "dictionaries" of Ancient Egypt (which might more correctly be labeled "encyclopedias"; they are in no way lexicons). -
Sam Mills
Samantha Mills
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Sam Mills was born in 1975. After graduating from Lincoln College, Oxford University, she worked briefly as a chess journalist and publicist before becoming a full-time writer. She has contributed short stories to literary magazines such as Tomazi and 3am and written articles for the Guardian, The Weeklings and The Independent.
She is the author of 3 young adult novels, published by Faber, including The Boys Who Saved the World, which is currently being adapted for film and the award-winning Blackout. Her debut novel for adults, The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair) was described by The Sunday Times as “an ingenious, energetic read” and the Guardian as “an extraordinary novel of orgiastic obsession.” Sam is one of the founding me -
Arianna Davis
By day, Arianna is the Editorial Director of Digital for the TODAY show. She is also the author of "What Would Frida Do? A Guide to Living Boldly," inspired by the life of the iconic artist Frida Kahlo. She is currently working on her first novel.
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Charles L. Mee Jr.
Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts. He is also a professor of theater at Columbia University. (Source: Wikipedia)
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Sumana Roy
Sumana Roy writes from Siliguri, a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal.
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Marisel Vera
Marisel Vera’s new novel The Taste of Sugar – a tale of love and endurance set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War – will be published by Liveright Publishing (a division of W.W. Norton & Company) in 2020.
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Marisel’s first novel If I Bring You Roses was published by Hachette Book Group in 2011. If I Bring You Roses is about a Puerto Rican couple who migrates to Chicago during Operation Bootstrap.
Vera grew up in the barrio in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. Vera studied writing with Paulette Roeske, Margaret Gibson, Jonis Agee, Rosellen Brown, and Cristina Garcia. Vera won the Willow Review literary magazine’s fiction prize for two of her short stories in 2000 ("The Liberation of Carmela Lopez") and 2003 ("Shoes for -
Grady Chambers
Grady Chambers is the author of the novel GREAT DISASTERS (forthcoming from Tin House Books, September 2025), and the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize.
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His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Sun, New England Review, Joyland, and elsewhere. Born in Chicago, Grady attended Vassar College, received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing. He lives in Philadelphia. -
Lisa Loomer
Lisa Loomer is an acclaimed American playwright and screenwriter whose work often explores family life, cultural identity, and pressing social issues. She is best known for The Waiting Room, a widely produced play examining body image and societal beauty standards across different cultures and eras. Her powerful storytelling also shaped the screenplay for the film Girl, Interrupted.
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Born in New York, Loomer later moved to Mexico, an experience that deepened her connection to Latina and immigrant narratives, which often appear in her work. She studied theatre at Brandeis University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, beginning her career as an actress and stand-up comic before turning to playwriting.
Loomer's plays, including Roe, Living Out, -
J.L. Torres
J.L.Torres was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico, a town in the center of the main island. He grew up in the South Bronx and received all of his formal education in the States. Then, he returned to the island to find roots and material for his writing. After years teaching at the college level there, he returned to New York. Besides New York City, he has lived in Madrid, Chicago, Los Angeles, and in Barcelona on a Fulbright.
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His work focuses on the diasporican experience—living in the inbetweeness that forms and informs the Puerto Rican experience. In the collection, The Family Terrorist and Other Stories,the novel, The Accidental Native , as well as his poetry collection, Boricua Passport, he aims to go beyond issues of identity, although these ar -
Horton Foote
Albert Horton Foote, Jr. was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta.
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