Suzan-Lori Parks

Praise for playwright Suzan-Lori Parks: "Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most important dramatists America has produced." ---Tony Kushner "[Parks's] stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous." ---Time Suzan-Lori Parks is one of America's most distinctive playwrights. In 2007 her creation 365 Plays/365 Days was produced in more than seven hundred theaters around the world. She has been named one of Time magazine's "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave" and is a recipient of the MacArthur Award. A former student of James Baldwin, Parks is a prolific author with novels, screenplays, and even a musical to her credit, but she is best known for her plays. Works such as Topdog/Underdog, In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, and The America Play have been widely produced and have won the highest honors (including the Pulitzer Prize and two Obies), but to date, books on Parks have been scarce. The latest addition to the Michigan Modern Dramatists series offers an indispensable guide to Parks's dramatic works, taking a close look at her major plays and placing them in context. Deborah R. Geis traces the evolution of Parks's art from her earliest experimental pieces to the hugely popular Topdog/Underdog to her wide-ranging forays into fiction, music, and film. Deborah R. Geis is Associate Professor of English at DePauw University. Her books include Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama; Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America (coedited with Steven F. Kruger); and Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust.