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K-State Today

February 19, 2013

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright talks and performs in Forum Hall tonight

Submitted by Marci Maullar

Suzan-Lori Parks

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks will present a talk-performance in Forum Hall in the K-State Student Union at 7 p.m. tonight. The presentation is free and open to the public.

At 3:30 p.m. Wednesday she will lead a discussion and a question and answer session in Nichols Theatre in Nichols Hall. Parks' talks are described as part performance, part storytelling, always high energy, with an inspired sense of humor. 

Named one of Time magazine's "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave," Parks is one of the most exciting and acclaimed playwrights in American drama today. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for the Broadway hit Topdog/Underdog and is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient. She has also been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts for drama, a Guggenheim Foundation Grant and is an alumnae of New Dramatists. Her work is also the subject of the PBS film "The Topdog Diaries."

Parks' visit is sponsored by Ebony Theatre and Diversity Programming Committee. For further information please contact Marci Maullar at marcima@k-state.edu or 785-532-6878.