LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks (1963– ). A playwright, novelist, and screenwriter and the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Parks has been celebrated by her fellow playwright August Wilson as “an original” whose “fierce intelligence and fearless approach to craft subvert theatrical conventions and produce a mature and inimitable art that is as exciting as it is fresh.” A Kentucky native, Parks grew up in a military family. Her father, a career Army officer, was stationed in West Germany, where Parks attended middle school and a German high school. Parks has said that the experience showed her “what it feels like to be neither white nor black, but simply foreign.” Returning to the United States, Parks lived and attended school in Kentucky, Texas, California, North Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont before going to Mount Holyoke College, earning her degree in English literature and German in 1985. She studied with writer James Baldwin, who encouraged her to become a playwright and who said that she “may become one of the most valuable artists of our time.”*

Genre: Domestic fiction; Historical fiction

More about Suzan-Lori Parks at ProQuest One Literature

*Suzan Lori Parks (1963--). (2020). In D. G. Felder, The American women's almanac: 500 years of making history. Visible Ink Press. Credo Reference.

By Suzan-Lori Parks

More by Suzan-Lori Parks

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks
A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, tells the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, names given to them as a joke by their father. Haunted by the past and their obsession with the street con game, three-card monte, the brothers come to learn the true nature of their history.
The America Play and Other Works by Suzan-Lori Parks
Contains the plays Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Devotees in the Garden of Love, Betting on the Dust Commander and several essays.
In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks
In this modern day riff on The Scarlet Letter, Hester La Negrita, a homeless mother of five, lives with her kids on the tough streets of the inner city.

About Suzan-Lori Parks

Mama's gun : Black maternal figures and the politics of transgression by Marlo D David
Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire's Push, Octavia Butler's Dawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from "ideal." David's study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures.
Suzan-Lori Parks by Philip C. Kolin (Editor)
The first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Suzan-Lori Parks has received international recognition for her provocative and influential works. Her plays capture the nightmares of African Americans endangered by a white establishment determined to erase their history and eradicate their dreams. A dozen essays address Parks's plays, screenplays and novel. Additionally, this book includes two original interviews (one with Parks and another with her long-time director Liz Diamond) and a production chronology of her plays.
Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks by Jennifer Larson
Critical study of a playwright and screenwriter who was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history. Larson discusses all of Parks's genres--play, screenplay, essay, and novel--closely reading key texts from Parks's more experimental earlier pieces as well as her more linear later narratives.

African American Women Writers

More about Suzan-Lori Parks at ProQuest One Literature

By Suzan-Lori Parks

More by Suzan-Lori Parks

About Suzan-Lori Parks