Suzan-Lori Parks was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama. More than two decades later, she dominates this year’s New York theater season with a 20th anniversary revival of her prize-winning play plus three new works, including one in which she performs.
Another Kentucky-born playwright, Marsha Norman, is a legend of stage and screen. She has won a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards and dozens of other major honors.
Former state poet laureate Richard Taylor stayed in Kentucky and made its rich history and landscape the material for his award-winning poetry, novels and nonfiction books.
These three living writers will be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame on March 23 in a ceremony at the historic Kentucky Theatre in Lexington. Joining them will be two deceased poets, Madison Cawein and Blanche Taylor Dickinson, who have largely been forgotten since they achieved fame more than a century ago.
Learn more about these Kentucky literary icons in this special section, written by Tom Eblen, a former Lexington Herald-Leader columnist and managing editor who is now the literary arts liaison at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning.
Suzan-Lori Parks
Five years ago, The New York Times’ theater critics declared Topdog/Underdog, by Kentucky-born playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the best American play of the previous quarter century—the best since Tony Kushner’s Angels in America rocked the theater world in 1993.
The play won Parks the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in drama, making her the first African American woman to receive the award. A critically acclaimed 20th anniversary revival of Topdog/Underdog opened at New York’s John Golden Theatre last fall, starring Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and directed by Kenny Leon.
But Parks, 59, has never been one to rest on accolades—or even pause long to take a deep breath. A creative dynamo, she seems to spin faster with age.
Her dramatic works have been in production for an astounding 35 years. She has written literally hundreds of plays, including more than two dozen stage plays, radio plays and screenplays that have been produced for major venues. She decided in 2002 to write a play a day for an entire year. Then, 18 years later, she launched another play-writing marathon during the pandemic.
Parks has published one novel and is writing a second. She is an accomplished essayist and a songwriter who plays guitar in a band with her husband, Christian Konopka, when they’re not busy raising their 11-year-old son. She teaches at New York University and the Public Theater in New York, where she is the writer in residence.
Topdog/Underdog is one of four Suzan-Lori Parks plays running in New York this season. The other three are new works. Sally & Tom, about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, premiered at the Guthrie Theater last fall. The Public Theater is presenting the other two plays this winter and spring: Plays for the Plague Year, in which Parks performs, and The Harder They Come, an adaptation of a 1972 movie for which she wrote the book and three new songs.
“I’m having fun,” she said in a telephone interview from her NYU campus apartment. “The work itself is this beautiful thing that life has afforded us.”
Parks was born at Fort Knox on May 10, 1963, to a career Army officer and an educator. When she was a toddler, the family was transferred. But they moved back to Kentucky when she was in elementary school, and Parks has fond memories of growing up here. Those Kentucky years influenced her future work, including her most famous play.
Topdog/Underdog, a darkly comic story about sibling rivalry and family relationships, features two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth. You can guess how the play ends. Parks, who has always been fascinated by history, remembers childhood trips to Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace near Hodgenville. “And my birthday’s on John Wilkes Booth’s birthday,” she said.
“I loved Mammoth Cave especially,” she said. “The landscape was very meaningful to me and is to this day. For years, I had a rock collection, which started in Kentucky as a kid in second grade.”
The first of Parks’ plays to be produced in New York also had a Kentucky angle. Betting on the Dust Commander (1987) is a humorous look at the endless repetition of daily life, and its action centers around the Kentucky Derby.
The Army kept Parks’ father, who eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel, on the move. In addition to Kentucky, she grew up in West Germany, California, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Maryland. While in high school, she fell in love with playing guitar.
“I started out as a musician but then sort of moved into writing because it felt like a safer profession,” she said. “The music scene is kind of dicey, fraught with intense energy, which is less safe than the library. I had an early love for the library. I would sit in the library wherever we lived. Those were some of my favorite places, sitting among the books.”
Parks earned a B.A. in English and German literature (Phi Beta Kappa) from Mount Holyoke College. She studied with James Baldwin, who encouraged her to pursue dramatic writing. She resisted at first but soon realized he was right.
“It’s not the imitation of life; it is actually life,” she said of drama. “Once you get to the moment of the curtain up at 7 o’clock at the Golden Theatre on Broadway, those people in the show, they’re alive. And the people in the seats are alive. And at the end of the day, literally, when they take their bows, it’s about what it means to be alive, what it means to be a community. I love action and activity. I love all the things about theater. It’s not just action. It’s not just dialogue. It’s not just description. It’s not just narrative arc. Often, it includes song. It includes interacting with living people.”
About her novel writing, Parks said, “It’s also a joyous experience but very different because the interaction with the audience is not as moment-by-moment. Drama and theater just have so much to offer, so many challenges, and you have to be good at so many things. And at the end, you have to get along with people enough so that they’ll do your play. You can’t just be that writer in the ivory tower saying, ‘Aren’t I brilliant? Publish this!’ You have to actually be in there with folks and be responsive to the needs of the community while also keeping your eye on the needs of the spirit.”
Parks’ plays have been winning awards since 1990, when she received an Obie for the best new American play (Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom). She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, the same year she was a Pulitzer finalist for In the Blood. She was a finalist again in 2015 for Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. (When she won the Pulitzer for Topdog/Underdog, the original production was directed by Frankfort native George C. Wolfe, who had directed Angels in America in 1993.)
When the MacArthur Foundation awarded Parks one of its lucrative “genius” grants in 2001, it noted that her “risk-taking, dramatic presentations reflect and refract social imagery from American culture and history. By creating compelling stories and characters that dramatize the complex influences that form both individual and collective identity, her explorations challenge us to reconsider our perceptions of others and ourselves.” The foundation added that her plays “are characterized by her signature use of provocative stagecraft, gritty colloquialisms and wordplay inspired by the looped and spiraling forms of jazz.”
For any writer to be so productive, so creative and so successful for so long, it begs the question: How does she do it?
“It’s just showing up,” she said. “One of the first awards I ever got—I still have it on my bookshelf. I’m looking at it now. My dad was in Vietnam. We were in Texas with my mom’s family. I went to St. Mary’s School, and I was in kindergarten or first grade. Perfect attendance. That was my first award. And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ You just keep showing up!”
A schedule also helps. “Am I organized?” she replied with a laugh when asked. “I’m the daughter of an Army colonel! I was born at Fort Knox, baby! My mother, who has a master’s degree and was an educator, just retired last year. So, we are a family of … well, we can get stuff done!”
Parks rises early each morning, writes in her notebook, and gets her son off to school. (She says parenting is often a tag-team effort with her husband, a night-owl musician.) She then does yoga and gets to work, measuring intensely focused writing stints with a kitchen timer.
“You’re not waiting for inspiration; you’ve just got to do it,” she said. “I write sometimes really awful first drafts. Sometimes, you have to, because sometimes, that’s all you got. Sometimes, you gotta just like slop it out there to see what you’ve got, and then you gotta make it better. Often, it’s all in the rewrite. And that takes a certain organization of the mind, organization of the spirit.”
She frequently offers this advice in a free writing class she hosts most Monday afternoons called Watch Me Work. Held in the Public Theater’s lobby until the pandemic forced it online, the class is open to writers of any level. They write along with her in silence for 20 minutes—there’s a kitchen timer—and afterward ask her questions and discuss the creative process.
“It’s a passion project,” she said. “It’s an opportunity for me to share freely ... just to be there for people who are at any stage or level of their creative process. You don’t have to have gotten into a grad school; you don’t have to have afforded tuition or gotten a grant. You just show up, and I’ll talk to you about your writing. And it really means something to people. It says, ‘You matter. I see you trying to do your thing.’ ”
Parks’ success also has come from taking advantage of opportunities, which at times were cleverly disguised as roadblocks. Plays for the Plague Year, which opens April 5 at the Public Theater venue Joe’s Pub, chronicles a year that shook American society to its core. With guitar in hand, she and seven actors perform three hours’ worth of short plays.
“I thought I might write 14 of these; it would be cute, a little thing for me to do during a brief hiatus,” she said. “And then the hiatus turned into a pandemic, and I kept writing. I had no idea that the year was going to be the year that it was—what with the pandemic, what with the vaccine coming, what with the mask troubles, what with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, the election and all the strife and the interesting times. It suddenly exploded into a very interesting year. I had no idea about that. But I did just keep showing up.”
Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman is a prolific playwright, screenwriter and novelist who since the early 1980s has been one of the best-known writers in American drama. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards and a long list of other major honors.
Norman was born Sept. 21, 1947, in Louisville and grew up near Audubon Park, the oldest of two daughters and two sons of an insurance salesman and a homemaker. She has described her childhood as isolated, which she said turned out to be good for a future writer. Many of her plays are about family dynamics and relationships.
Norman was asked in a 1993 interview with Kentucky writer Elizabeth Beattie what was the most important thing she felt she was doing with her work. “Dramatizing these moments of courage,” she replied, “moments of courage belonging to people you would not expect were equipped to deal with it.”
Gregory Constanzo / CAA
Playwright Marsha Norman
Norman graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and earned a master’s degree from the University of Louisville. She wrote for the Louisville Times and Kentucky Educational Television and worked as an educator in Jefferson County.
The first of Norman’s 14 stage plays, Getting Out, was produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and then Off Broadway in New York in 1979. The play is about a young woman paroled after an eight-year prison sentence for robbery, kidnapping and manslaughter. It was inspired by Norman’s experiences working with disturbed adolescents at Central State Hospital in Louisville.
Norman became famous after the New York production of her play ’night, Mother about a divorced woman, Jessie Cates, who lives with her mother, Thelma Cates. Over the course of an evening, Jessie calmly explains to Thelma that she plans to commit suicide and why. The play won Norman the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in drama, a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination.
Norman’s first love was music; she began playing piano at age 5. For years after her success with ’night, Mother, Norman longed to write for a Broadway musical. “I felt very trapped in the world of the tragic drama, and I wanted out of there,” she told Beattie.
Norman finally got her chance by adapting Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden into a musical, and it won her Tony and Drama Desk awards in 1992. She went on to write the book for the Broadway musical of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, winning a Tony nomination for the original 2005 production and a Tony Award for the 2016 revival. Her five musical adaptations for theater also have included The Trumpet of the Swan, The Bridges of Madison County and The Red Shoes.
Norman has been a prolific writer for television and film, with credits on a dozen projects. She won a 2009 Peabody Award for her work on the HBO series In Treatment. She also has written a novel, The Fortune Teller (1989), which explores parent-child relationships.
Norman’s other awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild Hall Academy of Arts & Letters and the William Inge Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Theater. She is a member of the Theater Hall of Fame. Norman has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, along with 18 honorary degrees from American colleges and universities.
She was co-chair of playwriting at The Juilliard School for 25 years until her retirement in 2020. She lives in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.
Richard Taylor
After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, Richard Taylor couldn’t decide on a career. His father, a trial attorney, suggested law school, so that occupied the next three years of his life.
“I practiced in his law firm about four or five months,” Taylor said in an interview. “Then I got out in the public interest. I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, and I wanted to write.”
Tom Eblen
Richard Taylor
Taylor took brief jobs at two Mississippi junior colleges to make sure he liked teaching. Then, he went back to the University of Kentucky and earned a Ph.D. in English, studying under Hall of Fame writer Guy Davenport. Taylor joined the faculty at Kentucky State University and began a prolific career as a Kentucky-focused poet, essayist, novelist, nonfiction writer and teacher.
Taylor may be best known as a poet, having served as Kentucky’s poet laureate from 1999-2001. The first of his 12 poetry collections, Bluegrass, was published in 1975 as one of the first books printed by Gray Zeitz at his legendary Larkspur Press in Owen County. Last year, as Taylor turned 81, he published his two most recent poetry collections: Bull’s Hell (Larkspur) and Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems (Accents Publishing).
“I was drawn to poetry because poetry could be written on the run, so to speak,” Taylor said. “Working on a poem has gotten me through more than one faculty meeting.”
Taylor found that he loved teaching almost as much as writing. While at Kentucky State, he regularly taught high school students in the summer Governor’s Scholars program. After retiring, he moved to Transylvania University as the Kenan Visiting Writer. He stepped down from that role last year. “I like working with young people,” he said. “I like constantly being confronted with ideas. I like an academic environment—if they would just drop the meetings and some of the protocols. I liked having time in the summer to write. Time over the holidays to write. I would not have had that practicing law.”
In addition to his dozen poetry books, Taylor has written two novels—Girty (1990) and Sue Mundy: A Novel of the Civil War (2006)—and four books of nonfiction: Three Kentucky Tragedies (1991), aimed at adults learning to read as part of a statewide literacy program; The Palisades of the Kentucky River (1997); The Great Crossing: A Historic Journey to Buffalo Trace (2002); and Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape (2018).
Taylor’s work has focused on Kentucky’s colorful history and beautiful landscape. He was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in the Crescent Hill area of Louisville. “The Taylors have been around here a long time,” the sixth-generation Kentuckian said. “Some people say too long.”
Taylor’s earliest ancestor to set foot in Kentucky was Reuben Taylor, who came in the 1770s as a teenaged surveyor from Virginia and settled near Louisville on land that is now part of Norton Commons. Reuben Taylor’s log cabin still stands, and Taylor and his brother are trying to preserve it.
Taylor has always been fascinated by the violent misfits of Kentucky history, such as the subjects of his two novels, Simon Girty and Sue Mundy. Girty fought with Indians and the British against white settlers in Kentucky. Mundy was the fictional name a Louisville newspaper editor gave to Confederate Capt. Marcellus Jerome Clarke, a young raider who had long hair and a baby face. Union soldiers captured Clarke in March 1865 and hanged him at the age of 20 in Louisville.
Three of Taylor’s poetry books have been episodic, narrative biographies of famous Kentuckians—Rail Splitter: Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln (2009); Rare Bird: Sonnets on the Life of John James Audubon (2011); and the recently published Bull’s Hell: Poems on the Life of Cassius M. Clay. “It’s such a durable and pliable form,” Taylor said. “And they were a lot of fun to do.”
Taylor’s book Elkhorn, winner of the 2018 Thomas D. Clark Medallion for the best book about Kentucky’s history or culture, chronicles an 8-mile stretch of Elkhorn Creek near Frankfort, where he lives in a rambling, book-filled house built in 1859.
Like Girty, Elkhorn is a mix of prose, poetry and imagined monologues. Taylor loves to play with language and doesn’t like to be tied down to one form of writing—or creativity. He is an avid watercolorist and sketch artist, making his own ink from black walnut hulls. The daily journals he has kept since 1984—he is now on volume 258—are filled with drawings and paintings as well as words.
“I think the best writing—fiction writing, poetry—relies on images,” he said. “I’m very much attracted to the visible world. So, the two kind of feed on one another.”
Taylor is finishing a book of essays about father figures. There are recollections of his own father, Joe Howard Taylor, the lawyer who wanted to be a landscape architect until he discovered he couldn’t draw. Another essay is about an uncle who lived with Taylor’s family when he was growing up. Louis F. Dey was an artist and photographer who helped inspire Taylor’s love of language and history.
Taylor has no grand plan for choosing writing projects. “I just go where whim leads me,” he said. “A lot of what I get interested in is something I hear or read and then think, ‘I’d like to know more about this.’ I have amassed such a library that I can do a lot of research right here.”
Part of that library owes to the fact Taylor is co-owner of Poor Richard’s Books in Frankfort, run since 1978 by wife Lizz Taylor, from whom he is separated. “Lizz is a first-rate businesswoman,” he said. “I joke that the place tends to prosper to the extent I’m not connected with it.”
Blanche Taylor Dickinson
Blanche Taylor Dickinson was a poet, short story writer and journalist whose work was published in several magazines and newspapers in the 1920s. Her poetry has been widely anthologized with the work of other Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
Dickinson was born in Franklin (Simpson County) on April 15, 1896, to farmers Thomas and Laura Taylor. She attended segregated schools in Simpson County, Bowling Green Academy and Simmons College in Louisville and taught in public schools.
Blanche Taylor Dickinson
One of her earliest published poems appeared in the local newspaper, The Franklin Favorite, in July 1925. Dickinson and her husband, truck driver Verdell Dickinson, lived in his hometown of Trenton in Todd County.
Two years later, the couple lived in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, and she was among several Black writers and artists featured in the magazine Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The magazine awarded her a Buckner Prize that year for “conspicuous promise” and for her poem “A Sonnet and a Rondeau.”
“As far back as I can remember I have had the urge to write poetry and stories,” Dickinson told the magazine. “My mother says that her youthful dreams were based on the same idea and perhaps she gave it to me as a prenatal gift. I do write a salable story once in a while and an acceptable poem a little oftener. The American Anthology [Unicorn Press], just released, contains three of my poems. I am intensely interested in all the younger Negro writers and try to keep in touch with them through the Negro press.”
Over the next three years, Dickinson’s poetry would be published in numerous magazines, including Opportunity, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis and Caroling Dusk. Her work also appeared in newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the Louisville Leader, the Longview (Texas) News Journal and the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1929, two white-owned poetry magazines, The American Poet and Bozart, published her work. She and her work have been featured in several books about the Harlem Renaissance poets.
In the late 1920s, Dickinson wrote regularly for the Pittsburgh Courier, publishing short fiction, including a four-part romantic serial “Nellie Marie from Tennessee.” She also wrote news notes columns for the Courier called “Smoky City’s Streets” and “Valley Echoes.” She interviewed aviator Amelia Earhart in 1929 for the Baltimore Afro-American.
Much of Dickinson’s poetry reflected upon the difficulty of Black women’s lives in the 1920s. It commented on racism, class, patriarchy and standards of beauty determined by white culture. “In her poem ‘Fortitude,’ Dickinson portrays the woman of the silent scream, the denial of her person, and her acceptance with a countenance of pride and a broken spirit,” Helen R. Houston wrote in the book Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Dickinson’s literary output stopped around 1930. The 1940 census showed her back home in Kentucky, living with her father and a widowed aunt and working as a schoolteacher. That census listed her as a widow. But according to other records, her husband, who was two years younger, didn’t die until 1978, in Pittsburgh. In later years, she went by the name Patty Blanche Taylor, which is how her tombstone reads.
She died in January 1972 at age 75 at Western State Hospital in Hopkinsville. Records after her death show that she had little money. Earl Burrus, a Black community leader and funeral director in Franklin, established a fund for her benefit. She is buried in Pleasant View Cemetery in Simpson County.
Madison Cawein
Madison Julius Cawein was an internationally known romantic poet in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. Most of his poetry was about nature, extolling the beauty of the countryside around Louisville. Comparisons to the British poets Percy Shelley and John Keats earned Cawein the nickname “the Keats of Kentucky.”
Cawein was born in Louisville on March 23, 1865, to William Cawein—a confectioner, chef and herbal doctor—and Christina Stelsley Cawein, a spiritualist. The couple had four sons, one daughter and little money.
When Cawein was 9, the family moved to rural Oldham County, where his father managed the Rock Springs Hotel for nearly two years. They later lived on a 20-acre hilltop farm near New Albany, Indiana, for three years. “Here I formed my great love for nature,” he wrote.
Madison Cawein
The family returned to Louisville in 1879. Cawein graduated from Male High School in 1886 and was selected “class poet.” Unable to afford college, he worked as a cashier at the Newmarket pool room, a center for horse race gambling, and read classic literature when things weren’t busy.
In 1887, at age 22, Cawein used his savings to publish Blooms of the Berry, his first collection of poems. It caught the attention of novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who gave it a favorable review in Harper’s magazine. They became lifelong friends.
After working at the Newmarket for nearly eight years, Cawein had earned enough money through savings and investments to quit and devote himself to writing. Cawein spent much of his free time roaming the woods around Louisville. He also made country rambles with his father, who was looking for medicinal plants to make the patent medicines he sold.
“Poetry I define as the metrical or rhythmical expression of the emotions, occasioned by the sight or the knowledge of the beautiful and the noble in ourselves,” Cawein wrote in a 1905 letter to Lexington author John Wilson Townsend.
Cawein lived for many years with his parents in a house at 19th and Market streets, where he wrote 19 books. That house is now Legacy Funeral Center – Schoppenhorst Chapel. Cawein married Gertrude McKelvey in 1903, and they had a son, Preston Hamilton Cawein, the next year. In 1917, the son’s name was changed to Madison Cawein II.
The Poetry Review of London wrote in 1912 that Cawein “appears quite the biggest figure among American poets.” His many fans included President Theodore Roosevelt and Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. Cawein was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Authors Club of London.
Over three prolific decades, Cawein wrote more than 1,500 poems and published 36 books. He told a Courier-Journal reporter in 1901 that his income from publishing poetry in magazines the year before amounted to about $100 a month, now the equivalent of about $3,500. He was a successful investor until the last two years of his life, when he suffered serious financial troubles, which forced him to rent out his beloved home on St. James Court and move with his family to an apartment across the street.
Cawein died in that apartment on Dec. 8, 1914, from an apparent stroke, several days after falling and hitting his head on the bathtub. He was 49. He is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery.
“He saw and felt the poetry of nature,” the Courier-Journal editorialized upon his death, “and it was his unswerving purpose to give it voice.”
Cawein’s romantic style of poetry was falling out of fashion toward the end of his life, but he made a contribution to what would come next. In 1913, Cawein published a poem titled “Waste Land” in a Chicago magazine whose editors included Ezra Pound. Scholars have identified this poem as an inspiration for T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” published in 1922 and considered an early example of modernism in poetry.