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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Enheduanna
Akkadian princess, High Priestess of the Moon god Nanna, daughter of Sargon the Great. c 2285–2250 BCE
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While millions of Mesopotamian women lived ordinary lives, an Akkadian princess, daughter of Sargon the Great, lived a life anything but ordinary. Enheduanna (2285 to 2250 B.C.) became one of the most prominent and powerful priestesses in all of Sumer and Akkad. She holds the unique position of being the world’s first named author in all of history.
Her literary output of hymns and songs to the goddess Inanna set a high standard and example of religious psalms, hymns, prayers and poetry that was followed for the next two thousand years. The writings of Enheduanna echoed through the centuries, influencing hymns and prayers in other cultures -
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- -
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v.
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Richard Greenberg
Richard Greenberg was an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He had more than 25 plays premiere on Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last. Greenberg is perhaps best known for his 2002 play Take Me Out.
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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 -
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.
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For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton... -
Cristina Rivera Garza
Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Houston and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2020.
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Augustine of Hippo
Early church father and philosopher Saint Augustine served from 396 as the bishop of Hippo in present-day Algeria and through such writings as the autobiographical Confessions in 397 and the voluminous City of God from 413 to 426 profoundly influenced Christianity, argued against Manichaeism and Donatism, and helped to establish the doctrine of original sin.
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An Augustinian follows the principles and doctrines of Saint Augustine.
People also know Aurelius Augustinus in English of Regius (Annaba). From the Africa province of the Roman Empire, people generally consider this Latin theologian of the greatest thinkers of all times. He very developed the west. According to Jerome, a contemporary, Augustine renewed "the ancient Faith."
The -
Ibn ʿArabi
Note to arabic readers : For the original arabic version of the books, check "other editions" in the book that interests you)
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Universally known by the title of "Muhyi al-Din" (The Reviver of the Religion) and "al-Shaykh al-Akbar" (The Greatest Shaykh) Ibn 'Arabī (Arabic: ابن عربي) (July 28, 1165 - November 10, 1240) was an Arab Sufi Muslim mystic and philosopher. His full name was Abū 'Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-`Arabī al-Hāṭimī al-Ṭā'ī (أبو عبد الله محمد بن علي بن محمد بن العربي الحاتمي الطائي).
Muhammad ibn al-Arabi and his family moved to Seville when he was eight years old. In 1200 CE, at the age of thirty-five, he left Iberia for good, intending to make the hajj to Mecca. He lived in Mecca for some three years, wher -
Nick Dear
Nick Dear is a British playwright and screenwriter. His best-known plays include The Art of Success and Frankenstein; among his many screenplays are Persuasion and Agatha Christie's Poirot. He lives in London, England.
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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 -
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (May 14/June 13 1265 – September 13/14, 1321), is one of the greatest poets in the Italian language; with the comic story-teller, Boccaccio, and the poet, Petrarch, he forms the classic trio of Italian authors. Dante Alighieri was born in the city-state Florence in 1265. He first saw the woman, or rather the child, who was to become the poetic love of his life when he was almost nine years old and she was some months younger. In fact, Beatrice married another man, Simone di' Bardi, and died when Dante was 25, so their relationship existed almost entirely in Dante's imagination, but she nonetheless plays an extremely important role in his poetry. Dante attributed all the heavenly virtues to her soul and imagi
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Angelina Weld Grimké
American journalist, teacher, playwright and poet who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first women of color to have a play publicly performed.
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Not to be confused with her great-aunt Angelina Emily Grimké, an abolitionist author. -
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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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 -
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.
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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. -
Gary Owen
Gary Owen is a Welsh playwright and screenwriter. His recent plays include Violence and Son which had its premiere at the Royal Court in June 2015, and Iphigenia in Splott for which he won the James Tait Black Prize for Drama.
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His other works include Love Steals Us From Loneliness, Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco, The Shadow of a Boy, (winner of Meyer Whitworth and George Devine awards), The Drowned World (winner of Fringe First and Pearson Best Play awards), Ghost City, Cancer Time, SK8, Big Hopes, In the Pipeline, Blackthorn, Mary Twice, Amgen:Broken, Bulletproof, and Free Folk. His adaptations include Spring Awakening and Ring Ring, a new version of La Ronde, for the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama; and Dickens' A Christmas Carol for Sh -
James Goldman
James Goldman was an American Academy Award-winning screenwriter and playwright, and the brother of screenwriter and novelist William Goldman.
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He was born in Chicago, Illinois and grew up primarily in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. He is most noted as the author of The Lion in Winter and author of the book for the stage musical Follies.
Goldman died from a heart attack in New York City, where he had lived for many years. -
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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Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.
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Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobb -
Madhuri Shekar
Madhuri Shekar was born in California and grew up in India, and after a couple of quick detours in Singapore and London, made her first grown-up home in Los Angeles. She currently shuttles between Jersey City, Los Angeles and Chennai.
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Her new audio play EVIL EYE debuted on the Audible best-seller list in May 2019. Her play HOUSE OF JOY will be getting its world premiere at Cal Shakes in August 2019. Also upcoming in the 2019/2020 season is her new commission from Victory Gardens, DHABA ON DEVON AVENUE.
Her play QUEEN had its World Premiere in April 2017 at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago, and was nominated for a Jeff Award for Best New Play. In 2018 it was produced in Seattle (Pratidhwani with ACT) and the Bay Area (EnActe Theatre), and ha -
Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is an English dramatist known for her use of non-naturalistic techniques and feminist themes, dramatisation of the abuses of power, and exploration of sexual politics.[1] She is acknowledged as a major playwright in the English language and one of world theatre's most influential writers.
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Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards i -
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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Geffrey Davis
Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA Editions), winner of the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions), winner of the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He also coauthored the chapbook Begotten (URB Books, 2016) with LA-based poet F. Douglas Brown. His words have appeared in Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
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Named a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Davis has received the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, and the Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, the Nati -
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 -
Marie de France
Marie de France ("Mary of France", around 1135-1200) was a poet evidently born in France and living in England during the late 12th century. Virtually nothing is known of her early life, though she wrote a form of continental French[citation needed:] that was copied by Anglo-Norman scribes. Therefore, most of the manuscripts of her work bear Anglo-Norman traits. She also translated some Latin literature and produced an influential version of Aesop's Fables.
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Sappho
Work of Greek lyric poet Sappho, noted for its passionate and erotic celebration of the beauty of young women and men, after flourit circa 600 BC and survives only in fragments.
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Ancient history poetry texts associate Sappho (Σαπφώ or Ψάπφω) sometimes with the city of Mytilene or suppose her birth in Eresos, another city, sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC. She died around 570 BC. People throughout antiquity well knew and greatly admired the bulk, now lost, but her immense reputation endured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho -
Moisés Kaufman
Moisés Kaufman (born November 21, 1963) is a playwright, director and founder of Tectonic Theater Project. He is best known for writing The Laramie Project with other members of Tectonic Theater Project. He is also the author of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and 33 Variations. He was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela and moved to New York City in 1987.
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Kaufman is of Romanian and Ukrainian Jewish descent. He described himself in an interview by saying "I am Venezuelan, I am Jewish, I am gay, I live in New York. I am the sum of all my cultures. I couldn’t write anything that didn’t incorporate all that I am."
Kaufman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. He made his Broadway directing debut in the 2004 production o -
Cynthia Ozick
Recipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008.
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Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
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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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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 -
Nella Larsen
Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.
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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 -
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
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Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody the next year. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was pub -
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.
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Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
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Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction a -
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, journalist, merchant, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations. He has been seen as one of the earliest proponents of the English novel, and helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson. Defoe wrote many political tracts, was often in trouble with the authorities, and spent a period in prison. Intellectuals and political leaders paid attention to his fresh ideas and sometimes consulted him.
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Defoe was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than three hundred works—books, pamphlets, and journals—on diverse topics, including -
Aeschylus
Greek Αισχύλος , Esquilo in Spanish, Eschyle in French, Eschilo in Italian, Эсхил in Russian.
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Aeschylus (c. 525/524 BC – c. 456 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly, characters interacted only with the chorus.
Only seven of Aeschylus's estimated 70 to 90 plays have survived. There is a long-standing debate regarding the authorship of one of them, Prometheus Bound, with some scholars arguing that it may be the work o -
Virgil
born 15 October 70 BC
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died 21 September 19 BC
Roman poet Virgil, also Vergil, originally Publius Vergilius Maro, composed the Aeneid , an epic telling after the sack of Troy of the wanderings of Aeneas.
Work of Virgil greatly influenced on western literature; in most notably Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. -
Homer
Homer (Greek: Όμηρος born c. 8th century BC) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history.
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Homer's Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his home after the fall of Troy. The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic. Most researchers believe -
Plato
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms. He raised problems for what became all the major areas of both theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, and was the founder of the Platonic Academy, a philosophical school in Athens where Plato taught the doctrines that would later become known as Platonism.
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Plato's most famous contribution is the theory of forms (or ideas), which has been interpreted as advancing a solution to what is now known as the problem of universals. He was decisively influenced by the pre-Socratic thinkers Pythagoras, H -
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 -
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.
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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 -
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.
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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. -
Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjian is a Chinese-born novelist, playwright, critic, and painter. An émigré to France since 1987, Gao was granted French citizenship in 1997. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is also a noted translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.
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Anthony Neilson
Anthony Neilson (born 1967) is a Scottish playwright and director. He is known for his collabo rative way of writing and workshopping his plays. Much of his work is characterised by the exploration of sex and violence.
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Neilson has been cited as a key figure of In-yer-face theatre, a term used to characterise new plays with a confrontational style and sensibility that emerged in British theatre during the 1990s. He has been credited with coining the phrase "in-your-face theatre" but has rejected the label and instead describes his work as “'experiential' theatre”. -
Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple and the book for the musical The Bridges of Madison County. She was co-chair of the playwriting department at The Juilliard School until stepping down in 2020.
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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 -
Christopher Shinn
Christopher Shinn is the author of Dying City (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Where Do We Live (Obie in Playwriting), Now or Later (Evening Standard Theater Award for Best Play shortlist), and Four. Most recently, his play Against premiered at the Almeida Theatre and his adaptation of Ödön von Horváth's Judgment Day premiered at Park Avenue Armory. Of his thirteen original plays, over half had their world premiere in England, with five at the Royal Court. Fellowships include the Guggenheim (2005), the Radcliffe (2019), and the Cullman (2020). His plays are published by Methuen and he teaches playwriting at the New School.
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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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Amiri Baraka
Poems and plays, such as Dutchman (1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.
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He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.
He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Colum -
Philip Dawkins
Mr. Dawkins' work includes the world premiere of Miss Marx: or the Involuntary Side Effect of Living (Strawdog Theatre), which won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Work, as well as recent critically-acclaimed plays The Homosexuals and Failure: A Love Story, which both also received Joseph Jefferson Nominations for New Work after their world premieres with About Face Theatre (2011) and Victory Gardens Theater (2012) respectively. His plays for young folks are published through Playscripts, Inc. A graduate of Loyola University, Chicago, Mr. Dawkins is an Artistic Associate of About Face Theatre, an Ensemble Playwright at Victory Gardens, and a founding member of Chicago Opera Vanguard. Mr. Dawkins teaches playwriting at Northwestern Un
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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 -
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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Dominique Morisseau
Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has authored over nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Projects. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for 2018.
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Charles Gordone
Charles Gordone was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith (born September 18, 1950) is an American actress, playwright, and professor. She is currently the artist in residence at the Center for American Progress. Smith is widely known for her roles as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally in The West Wing and as Hospital Administrator Gloria Akalitus in the Showtime series Nurse Jackie. She is a recipient of The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2013), one of the richest prizes in the American arts with a remuneration of $300,000.
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In 2009 Smith published her first book, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics. In 2006 she released another, Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind.
As a d -
Enheduanna
Akkadian princess, High Priestess of the Moon god Nanna, daughter of Sargon the Great. c 2285–2250 BCE
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While millions of Mesopotamian women lived ordinary lives, an Akkadian princess, daughter of Sargon the Great, lived a life anything but ordinary. Enheduanna (2285 to 2250 B.C.) became one of the most prominent and powerful priestesses in all of Sumer and Akkad. She holds the unique position of being the world’s first named author in all of history.
Her literary output of hymns and songs to the goddess Inanna set a high standard and example of religious psalms, hymns, prayers and poetry that was followed for the next two thousand years. The writings of Enheduanna echoed through the centuries, influencing hymns and prayers in other cultures -
Marvin A. Carlson
Ph.D.in Drama and Theatre, Cornell University. Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies.
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Research and teaching interests include dramatic theory and Western European theatre history and dramatic literature, especially of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He has been awarded the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the George Jean Nathan Prize, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University, a Visiting Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, and a Fellow of the American Theatre. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doct -
Tom Murphy
Tom Murphy (born 1935) is an Irish dramatist who has worked closely with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and with Druid Theatre, Galway. Born in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland, he currently lives in Dublin.
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Emmet Kirwan
Emmet Kirwan is an Irish Actor, Playwright and poet. His play 'Dublin Oldschool' won the prestigious Stewart Parker award and was performed at The National Theatre London and has recently been made into a feature film set for release in 2018. He is known for writing and staring in the Irish television cult comedy series Sarah and Steve (2010) and writing and performing the IFTA award winning poetry short film 'Heartbreak' He is a veteran actor of the Irish stage and his distinctive voice can be heard narrating many Irish documentaries and television shows.
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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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Martin Gottfried
Martin Gottfried,was a New York drama critic for over forty years and the author of five biographies and two books of theater criticism.
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Gottfried graduated from Columbia College in New York City in 1959,and attended Columbia Law School for three semesters, next spending one year with U.S. Army Military Intelligence.Gottfried began his writing career as the classical music critic for The Village Voice, doubling as an off-Broadway reviewer for Women's Wear Daily, a position that made him the youngest member of the New York Drama Critics Circle in the organization's history.
Winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, Martin Gottfried was the chief dramatic critic for th -
Hrotsvitha
On ancient Roman plays, German nun and poet Roswitha (Hrotsvitha) (circa 935-circa 1000) modeled dialogs that represent an early stage in the revival of European drama.
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With a name also spelled Hroswitha, Hrotsvit, or Hrosvit, this a 10th-century German secular canoness and dramatist, born into nobility, lived and worked in a community, the abbey of Bad Gandersheim in modern-day Lower Saxony, Germany. She attests her name as Saxon for "strong voice."
After antiquity, some critics consider her, who wrote in Latin, as the first person to compose drama in Latin-influenced western Europe.
Hrotsvit studied under Rikkardis and Gerberg, daughter of Henry the Fowler, king. Otto I the Great, emperor and brother of Gerberg, penned a history, one of p -
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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