Blaustein Humanities Center, Ernst Common

The Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium was established in 1989 to create a positive, living memorial to Daniel Klagsbrun, a 1986 graduate of Connecticut College. Through the generosity and commitment of Daniel's parents, Emilie and Herbert Klagsbrun, the symposium has brought to the College an impressive array of authors, including: Saul Bellow, Adrienne Rich, Elie Wiesel, Sandra Cisneros, Joseph Brodsky, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Cunningham, Dorothy Allison, Tobias Wolff, Amy Tan, Hannah Tinti '94, E.L. Doctorow, Jay McInerney, Art Spiegelman, David Sedaris and Dorothy Allison.This year's speaker is Suzan-Lori Parks, a multi-award-winning American writer/musician and the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Topdog/Underdog which recently enjoyed its twentieth anniversary Broadway revival. The production won both the 2023 Tony Award, (Best Revival Of A Play) and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Just last year, in 2023, Parks also had three new works which all received world premieres: at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Sally & Tom (Steinberg New Play Award finalist) at Joe's Pub in New York City, Plays for the Plague Year (winner of The Drama Desk Award for Best Music in a Play), and, at the Public Theatre, Parks world-premiered a musical adaptation of the 1972 film The Harder They Come (winner: Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical.)In 2023 Parks was named among "TIME MAGAZINE'S 100." Other notable accolades and awards include the prestigious Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a Lila-Wallace—Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.In November 2022, Parks was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. She is Writer in Residence of the Public Theater, a professor at New York University, and an alumna of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College where she studied creative writing with James Baldwin, who encouraged Parks to begin writing for the theatre. In her spare time, Parks also writes songs and fronts her band Sula and The Joyful Noise.

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