Each year, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award confers upon an American playwright in mid-career, with an outstanding voice working indisputably at the highest level of achievement, a $10,000 cash prize. The award was developed to reflect Laura Pels’s dedication to supporting excellence in American theater, as well as PEN America’s commitment to recognizing and rewarding the playwright’s literary accomplishments.
Nominations for the 2024 cycle will be open June 1–August 1, 2023.
2022 Honoree: ERIKA DICKERSON-DESPENZA
Judges: Luis Alfaro, Saheem Ali
Erika Dickerson-Despenza is a New Orleans-based Blk radical leftist writer and ecowomanist cultural-memory worker. She is the creator and inaugural resident of The Ntozake Shange Social Justice Playwriting Residency, which supports distinguished women, femme, and non-binary scholar-playwrights of the African Diaspora for two-year terms. Her work includes shadow/land (The Public Theater, 2023), cullud wattah (The Public Theater, 2021), and [hieroglyph] (San Francisco Playhouse/Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 2021). Currently, Erika is developing a 10-play Katrina Cycle, which centers climate crisis-induced and state-sanctioned water vulnerabilities and displacement rippling in and beyond New Orleans and the Midwest, a Disney musical adaptation of a New York Times #1 bestselling YA novel and an original feature film with Mattel.
History
2022 Jackie Sibblies Drury
From the judges’ citation:
“Jackie Sibblies Drury is an artist who gives voice to the voiceless, exploring freshly investigated worlds from the inside out so that they become part of the natural landscape of the theater. With courage, steadfastness, and thoughtfulness, she shifts the theater panorama to encompass new vistas of race, class, and exploded perspective into what traditionally have been rigid environments.”
2021 Daniel Alexander Jones
2020 Tanya Barfield
2019 Larissa FastHorse
2018 Sibyl Kempson
2017 Tarell Alvin McCraney
2016 Young Jean Lee
2015 Anne Washburn
2014 Donald Marguiles
2013 Kirsten Greenidge
2012 Will Eno and Adam Rapp
2011 Marcus Gardley
2010 Theresa Rebeck
2009 Nilo Cruz
2008 Sarah Ruhl
2007 Naomi Iizuka
2006 Stephen Adly Guirgis
2005 Dael Orlandersmith
2004 Lynn Nottage
2003 Craig Lucas
2002 Tony Kushner
2001 Charles Mee, Jr.
2000 Suzan-Lori Parks
1999 Paula Vogel
1998 Richard Greenberg
Selection Process
Nominations for this award are solicited from Professional Members of PEN America, as well as any playwright, writer, or member of the theater community. Each year’s judging panel takes these nominations into consideration, and all nominations may be supplemented by nominations from the judges themselves.