Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work.
Biography
Naomi Wallace was born in Prospect, Kentucky, to Henry F. Wallace, a photo journalist and correspondent for Time/Life magazine, and Sonja de Vries, a Dutch justice and human rights worker. Wallace obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hampshire College. She then received two master's degrees from the University of Iowa. Currently, she divides her time between Kentucky and the Yorkshire Dales in Northern England, where she lives with her partner, Bruce McLeod, with whom she has three children. Wallace has taught English literature, poetry and playwrighting at Yale University, UCLA, University of Iowa, Illinois State University, Merrimack College, Hampshire College, American University of Cairo, Vrije University of Amsterdam and other institutions. She has also worked with women in the criminal justice system, and is a member of SURJ, Showing up for Racial Justice. She has been called "a dedicated advocate for justice and human rights in the U.S. and abroad, and Palestinian rights in the Middle East," and her writing described as "muscular, devastating, and unwavering." In the mid-2000s, Wallace was briefly detained by Homeland Security after defying the ban on travel to Cuba. In August 2016, Wallace was one of the Freedom Riders with the Women's Boat to Gaza. Wallace is a supporter of the B.D.S. movement.
Wallace's work has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, and an Obie Award. She is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts development grant. In 2009, One Flea Spare was incorporated into the permanent répertoire of the French National Theatre, the Comédie-Française, and produced there in 2012. Wallace is the only living American playwright to enter the répertoire. Only two American playwrights have ever been added to La Comédie's repertoire in 300 years: the other being Tennessee Williams. The play was translated into French by Dominique Hollier. In 2012, Wallace was a recipient of the for most promising new American play. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize established at Yale University. In 2015, Wallace received an in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award citation reads: "Naomi Wallace is a powerful and essential voice who brings to the theater great lyricism and moral courage. Her characters, so cruelly treated and often destroyed, speak with a direct and devastating poetry. Never does this dramatist mollify or fail to engage us on the deepest level, and her three "Visions" of the Middle East that comprise The Fever Chart are short, stark masterworks."
Work
Signature Theater, the Off Broadway company that has historically mounted a season of plays, produced three of , including the world premiere of Night is a Room.
