Lucas Hnath, Suzan-Lori Parks To Receive Wyndham-Campbell Prizes of $165,000

American playwrights Lucas Hnath and Suzan-Lori Parks are among the eight writer recipients of the Donald Wyndham-Sandy Campbell Literature Prizes which will be awards at Yale Sept. 12 to 14. Recipients will each receive $165,000.

Hnath's play "A Doll's House, Part Two" was nominated last year for a Tony Award. The play will also be presented as part of the 2018-19 season at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre season,. His other works include "The Christians" (2014), "Red Speedo" (2013), "Death Tax" (2012), and "A Public Reading of An Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney (2011)" the latter which was presented last year by the New Haven Theatre Company.

The Florida-born Hnath is also a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre and New Dramatists, and a winner of a Steinberg Playwright Award (2017), an Obie Award for Playwriting (2016), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), he holds a BFA and an MFA from New York University, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Dramatic Writing.

Parks is a Puliutzer Prize winner for the play "Topdog/Underdog" in 2002. Her play "Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1,2 and 3" is the next show slated for Yale Repertory Theatree in New Haven.

A winner of a Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2015), a MacArthur Fellowship (2001), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000), among many other honors, Parks has written numerous scripts for radio and screen, as well as a novel, "Getting Mother’s Body "(2003). Her latest project is "Watch Me Work," a free live-streamed writing workshop for artists of all disciplines. She lives in New York City, where she is a professor at New York University, and serves as the Public Theater’s Master Writer Chair.

Other recipients of the Donald Wyndham-Sandy Campbell Literature Prizes, which are given out annually -- this year to two playwrights, poets, writers of fiction and non-fiction -- also include British author Sarah Bakewell (non-fiction), Jamaican poet Lornas Goodison, Los Angeles poet Cath Park Hong, novelist, poet, and translator John Keene, and critic and writer Olivia Laing and Ugandan novelist living in England Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi.