Susan-Lori Parks: Reader Reflection Sample
1. Susan-Lori Parks is a creative writer and playwright. She describes her plays as having no fixed meaning, and as intended to be reread and given a variety of meanings and interpretations. She took a creative writing class from prominent black writer James Baldwin while she was an undergraduate student.
2. Parks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002 for the play Topdog/Underdog, making her the first black woman to have ever received this award. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards for her work as well, including the MacArthur Fellowship.
3. The two anonymous brothers in the play Topdog/Underdog are named Lincoln and Booth, after United States president Abraham Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth. These names reflect the theme of the characters’ complex relationships with their national history that appears in the play.
Work Referenced
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, Et al. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Vol. 2 W.W. Norton & Company, March 25, …
