A short life of the author
Suzan-Lori Parks (born 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky) is an American playwright and novelist who studied with James Baldwin at Mount Holyoke College. Baldwin, recognising her talent, wrote her a letter of recommendation that launched her theatrical career. She became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Topdog/Underdog (2001), a two-character play about brothers named Lincoln and Booth who hustle three-card monte in a seedy boarding house.
Major Works
Parks’s theatrical language is distinctive — she uses what she calls “rep & rev” (repetition and revision), a technique drawn from jazz in which phrases and scenes are repeated with variations that accumulate meaning. Major plays include The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), The America Play (1994) — in which a Black man who resembles Abraham Lincoln earns his living in a sideshow — and Venus (1996), based on the historical exploitation of Sarah Baartman.
Her novel Getting Mother’s Body (2003, Random House) transposes Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to 1960s Texas, following a pregnant young Black woman’s journey to exhume her mother’s body before a highway is built over the grave.
Collecting Parks
Published plays (Theatre Communications Group) are the primary collectibles. Topdog/Underdog (2001) and The America Play and Other Works (1995) first editions bring $30–$80. Getting Mother’s Body (2003, Random House) first edition is affordable. Signed copies are available through theatre events.