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Suzan-Lori Parks Wikipedia

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Suzan-Lori Parks (1964 - ) is an African-American playwright and novelist. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College in 1985 with a B.A. in English and German literature.

While a student at Mount Holyoke, Parks took a writing class with Five Colleges (Massachusetts) |Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin (writer)|James Baldwin. At his behest, she began to write plays.

Parks wrote her first screenplay for the 1996 Spike Lee movie called Girl 6 (movie)|Girl 6 (the story of an aspiring actress who works for a phone-sex hotline). Her most recent teleplay is Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005 television)|Their Eyes Were Watching God based upon the novel by Zora Neale Hurston and produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions.

She is the author of the novel Getting Mother's Body. Her other plays include: The America Play (the opening scene of which inspired Topdog/Underdog, a play about family identity, fraternal interdependence, and the struggles of everyday African American life), Venus, In the Blood and Fucking A.

Last Modified:   2005-12-19