What elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) does Suzan-Lori Parks incorporate in her drama In the Blood?

Elaborate on the “truth” (or lack thereof) of Parks’s statement that white artists create art while black artists make statements.

What are the differences between what Parks calls “figures” and more traditional dramatists call “characters”?

Compare Parks’s novel Getting Mother’s Body to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930).

Who was Saartjie Baartman and how did Parks use or abuse her real-life story in her play Venus?

Explain Parks’s fascination with Abraham Lincoln.

Though her literary reputation rests primarily on her dramatic writing, Suzan-Lori Parks has also written several screenplays: Anemone Me, an independent film released in New York in 1990, Girl 6, directed by Spike Lee and released in 1996, and two scripts for Jodie Foster and Danny Glover. Parks has also written several essays that have been published in theater journals.

Suzan-Lori Parks produced her first play, The Sinner’s Place, in 1984, as a student at Mount Holyoke College. Her second, Betting on the Dust Commander, debuted in a Brooklyn garage in 1987, with Parks purchasing five folding chairs to accommodate the audience. From these modest beginnings, Parks has become one of the most celebrated American playwrights of her generation. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, produced in 1989, earned Parks her first Obie Award for best new American play, and The New York Times named her the year’s most promising playwright. Parks received her second Obie, for Venus, in 1996. Her next play, In the Blood, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000.

Parks has received numerous fellowships and grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001. In 2002, Parks became only the fourth African American and the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Yale University, and New York University. She also served as writer-in-residence at the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York from 1991 to 1992. In 2000, Parks became director of the Audrey Skirball Kernis Theatre Projects Writing for Performance program at the California Institute of the Arts.