Suzan-Lori Parks

: January 5, 2024
: Playwright

Quick Facts
Suzan-Lori Parks Biography
Suzan-Lori Parks Net Worth
Height, Weight & Body Measurements
Who is Suzan-Lori Parks Dating?
Facts & Trivia

Quick Facts

Full Name	Suzan-Lori Parks
Occupation	Playwright
Date Of Birth	May 10, 1963(1963-05-10)
Age	61
Birthplace	Fort Knox
Country	United States
Birth City	Kentucky
Horoscope	Taurus

Suzan-Lori Parks Biography

Name	Suzan-Lori Parks
Birthday	May 10
Birth Year	1963
Place Of Birth	Fort Knox
Home Town	Kentucky
Birth Country	United States
Birth Sign	Taurus
Spouse	Paul Oscher

Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most popular and richest Playwright who was born on May 10, 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky, United States. She was awarded The MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 2001. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog , which she performed in 2002.

Her screenplay for her first film, Girl 6, was transformed into a movie directed by Her first screenplay, Girl 6, was made into a film directed by Spike Lee in 1996. in 1996.

While she was an undergraduate, her Mount Holyoke English professor Mary McHenry introduced Parks to James Baldwin. Parks was initially opposed to theater, thinking that it was “where a lot of people with too much attitude wore funny clothes and funny little costumes, and they talked with funny little voices even though they were from, like, New York or New Jersey. And I didn’t respect that.” Parks began to take classes with Baldwin and, at his behest, began to write plays. She was still out of touch with theater; the only plays she was familiar with were those of Shakespeare, only because she was a German/English major. Parks also noted that she was inspired by Wendy Wasserstein, a 1971 Mount Holyoke graduate who won the Pulitzer in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles. Parks also credited another Mount Holyoke professor, Leah Blatt Glasser, with her success.

Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky. She grew up with two siblings in a military family. Parks enjoyed writing poems and songs and even created a newspaper with her brother, called the “Daily Daily”. In 1974 her father, a career officer in the United States Army, was stationed in West Germany where she attended middle school and attended German high school. The experience showed her “what it feels like to be neither white nor black, but simply foreign”. After returning to the United States Parks lived and attended school in several states such as Kentucky, Texas, California, North Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont. Parks says her constant relocation could have influenced her writing. She graduated high school at The John Carroll School in 1981 while her father was stationed in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

She was married to blues singer Paul Oscher.

Suzan-Lori Parks Net Worth

Net Worth	$5 Million
Source Of Income	Playwright
House	Living in own house.

Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the richest Playwright from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Suzan-Lori Parks 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

She was a high school student in Germany before making the move into America. United States and graduating from The John Carroll School in 1981.

She composed a play every day between November 2002 and November 2003, which resulted in”365 Days/365 Plays.

Although Betting on the Dust Commander was not the first play Parks wrote, it was the first of her plays to be produced. Her first play The Sinner’s Place, which she wrote for her senior project at Mount Holyoke, was rejected for production by her college’s drama department as they considered it too experimental since she wanted to have dirt on the stage during the performance. When her second play, Betting on the Dust Commander, first premiered, it ran for three nights in a bar in Manhattan’s Lower East Side called Gas Station. It is a short, one-act play set in Kentucky, centering around the lives of a couple, Mare and Lucius, who have been married for 110 years. Parks’s unique voice is displayed throughout the text via her use of specific dialect and incorporation of the sounds of sniffling and sneezing as part of the dialogue. The play’s title comes from the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1970, Dust Commander. As the play goes on, we discover that Dust Commander’s Derby is responsible for bringing Mare and Lucius together, and through the couple’s discussion of him they think back over their many years of memories together. The motif of dust along with many of the play’s lines are intentionally repeated throughout the text, in addition to this Parks does not give the audience any information on how these two characters have managed to live for so long, in this way she destabilizes any linear sense of memory and time. Parks complicates the audience’s view of history, relationships, and the past; some argue that Parks’s incorporation of these elements and the repetitive style of the text is reminiscent of African rituals and the way that their retelling of stories often incorporate the past in a literal manner.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

Suzan-Lori Parks height Not available right now. Suzan-Lori weight Not Known & body measurements will update soon.

Who is Suzan-Lori Parks Dating?

According to our records, Suzan-Lori Parks married to Paul Oscher. As of December 1, 2023, Suzan-Lori Parks’s is not dating anyone.

Relationships Record : We have no records of past relationships for Suzan-Lori Parks. You may help us to build the dating records for Suzan-Lori Parks!

Parks credits the impact of Mount Holyoke on her career later in life. Since acting at the Drama Studio, Suzan-Lori Parks has received 11 awards, being the first female African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002. She has also received a number of grants including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2001, the same year as the production of her play “Topdog/Underdog”.

Facts & Trivia

Suzan-Lori Ranked on the list of most popular Playwright. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Suzan-Lori Parks celebrates birthday on May 10 of every year.

One of her best-known works is Topdog/Underdog. This play marked a departure from the heightened language she usually wrote. Parks is an admirer of Abraham Lincoln and believed he left a legacy for descendants of slaves. Topdog/Underdog explains what that legacy is. It tells the story of two African-American brothers: Lincoln and Booth. Lincoln works at a boardwalk arcade, dressing up like Abraham Lincoln and letting the tourists shoot him with plastic guns. He got this job because he could be paid less than the white man who had the job before. Parks does not judge Lincoln in this play, but rather enjoys bringing him into the other characters’ lives and seeing how they are affected. She said, “Lincoln is the closest thing we have to a mythic figure. In days of Greek drama, they had Apollo and Medea and Oedipus – these larger than life figures that walked the earth and spoke – and they turned them into plays. Shakespeare had kings and queens that he fashioned into his stories. Lincoln, to me, is one of those.” Parks also believes that Lincoln “created an opening with that hole in his head.” She makes the case that everything we do has to pass through everything else, like the eye of a needle. She says we have all passed through the hole in Lincoln’s head on our journey to whatever lies ahead. Like many of her other plays, Topdog/Underdog takes her characters on a quest to find out who they are and to examine the stories and experiences that have shaped their lives. More than anything, she believes that we have an important relationship with the past.

What is Suzan-Lori Parks famous for?

The first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2002) and a pioneer of historically conscious and linguistically complex theater , her work is now taught at drama schools across the country. Parks was born on May 10, 1963 at Fort Knox in Kentucky to Donald and Francis McMillian Parks.