Grit and magic: Suzan-Lori Parks gets candid at 2025 Klagsbrun Symposium

Connecticut College’s 21st Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium welcomes Playwright and Screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks 

“Theater is living,” playwright and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks told the students, faculty, staff, alumni and other guests gathered in Ernst Common Room for the 2025 Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Creative Arts and Moral Vision. “It’s the craft, the art, the miracle of living.”

The 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winner for drama later elaborated while discussing Plays for the Plague Year, a series of what she describes as “microplays” written during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “I wanted us to have something beautiful to, like a campfire, circle around and celebrate.”

For 75 minutes, Parks brought that kind of spirit to the panel interview—conducted by Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence Kate Rushin and Associate Professor of English Jeff Strabone—and the audience Q&A that followed. Eschewing solemnity for honesty, energy and irreverence, Parks presented the act of writing as one of both grit and magic, a process based on finding joy and making space for pain.

While Parks draws inspiration from several prior masters in the field, she prefers to say she walks with them rather than stands on their shoulders. She recalled a love of the written word first coming from within. “In 1972, 1973, we were living in Vermont. We had this grand piano, and I used to sit underneath it. Mom would ask me what I was doing, and I’d say, ‘I’m writing my novel.’ I was in fifth grade, and my parents learned I was going to be a writer because I told them so.”

In response, Parks’ mother passed her a copy of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. A decade later, the writer would study under Baldwin at Hampshire College. As she noted of that time, “He said very complimentary things of my writing. Basically, that I might be somebody. And I didn’t have the heart to prove him wrong.”

Indeed, Parks has gone on to craft an impressive bibliography, including such works as the plays Topdog/Underdog, Venus, and White Noise, and screenplays for the 2019 film adaptation of Native Son and Spike Lee’s 1996 joint Girl 6. She has been honored for those works with several Obie Awards, a Tony, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and, of course, the aforementioned Pulitzer.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the multitude of credits and accolades, Parks continues to see writing as an integral part of her life, one you must engage with, like any responsibility.

“My job is still the same,” she explained. “Show up. Tell the truth.”

Parks continued, “[Writing is] really boring. You know, in the movies, they get up and they’ve got great hair and…That’s great. That’s a movie. I get up and go to my desk, and I write for as long as I can. Sometimes it’s an hour. Sometimes, it is 30 minutes before someone shows us and says, ‘Hey, Mom,’ and I have to get him lunch money because life is happening. And it sounds boring and not poetic, but when the basic stuff is taken care of, I can lock in. I can look for my inspiration.”

The Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Creative Arts and Moral Vision 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 amazing array of authors, including: Dorothy Allison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Michael Cunningham, E.L. Doctorow, Jhumpa Lahiri, Wally Lamb, Colum McCann, Jay McInerney, Adrienne Rich, David Sedaris, Jessica Soffer ’07, Art Spiegelman, Amy Tan, Hannah Tinti ‘94, Elie Wiesel and Tobias Wolff.