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Suzan-Lori Parks

Playwright, screenwriter and novelist; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2002

United States · b. 1963

American dramatist, the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Topdog/Underdog. Born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, she moved frequently as a child because of her father’s army career, including four years in West Germany. She was encouraged toward the theatre by James Baldwin while a student at Mount Holyoke College.

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Question What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it?

But it was quite intense to be the first Black person that my German friends had seen. Actually laid eyes, and hands, on. And there was the German language, which I had to learn, and the German kids learned British English, so my American English was frowned upon. … Maybe I write like I do because I spent those years in the cauldron of not fluently speaking the native language of my classmates. Those several years of being told that the tongue I spoke wasn’t right.

Recorded Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, The Paris Review, Issue 235, Winter 2020, 2020 source ↗

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