Lynn Nottage is a playwright who serves as associate professor of theatre at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and artist in residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She has written a dozen full-length plays, two of which (Sweat and Ruined) won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Her plays primarily center on the experiences of working-class Black people.

Nottage is the recipient of three Obie Awards, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was named by Time in their 2019 list of the 100 Most Influential People.

“I hope to begin researching a new fiction project about a Black college student from Brooklyn who falls in love with a Norwegian photographer,” Nottage told AAR. Set in the early 1950s, the story follows this couple’s romantic summer roaming Southern Europe until the world interrupts. “I’m looking forward to the space and time to read, research, and wander around Umbria. I have had an impossibly busy two years, and as such, I haven’t had ample room to make work and ruminate.”

The photograph of Lynn Nottage was taken by Lynn Savarese.