Life Sketch and Works

Suzan-Lori Parks, the daughter of an Army Colonel, was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1964. As a member of a military family, Parks moved often, first to West Texas and then to Germany, where she settled during her teenage years. While attending German schools, Parks began to write short stories. When she returned to the United States, she attended Mount Holyoke College, where she studied creative writing with the novelist James Baldwin. Baldwin was the first to encourage her development as a playwright. At the time Parks had the habit of acting out the characters’ parts when she read her short stories in class.

Her first play, The Sinner's Place, was produced in 1984 in Amherst, Massachusetts. While at Mount Holyoke, Parks was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985. She also studied at the Yale University School of Drama. After college, she traveled to London to write plays and study acting. Her second play, Betting on the Dust Commander, was produced in 1987, followed by Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, which won a 1990 Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway play of the year. Her play, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), explores the issues of racism and sexism that have been characteristics of her work from her earliest days as a playwright. These plays, like the others that followed, challenge the conventions of the modern theater as they address social issues such as slavery, gender roles, and poverty.

Parks won her second Obie Award for Venus (first produced in 1996), a dramatic account of how, in 1810, a Khoi-San woman was brought from South Africa to England to serve as a sideshow attraction. Her greatest critical acclaim to date arrived with the production of Topdog/Underdog, a play she began writing in 1999 and was produced Off Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in 2001 under the direction of George C. Wolfe. It is her first play to appear on Broadway, debuted in April 2002 at the Ambassador Theatre, and, shortly, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama, thereby making Parks the first African American woman to receive that award.