Edward Albee was born on March 12, 1928. He was adopted as an infant by Reid Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee of the powerful Keith-Albee vaudeville chain. He was raised in great affluence and sent to preparatory and military schools. ending his formal education after a year and a half at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Albee often clashed with his mother and eventually left home when he was 20 and moved to New York's Greenwich Village. Albee's first job was writing continuity dialogue for radio station WNYC. After using up the inheritance from his paternal grandmother, he took a variety of menial jobs until 1959 when The Zoo Story made him a famous playwright, first in Europe, where it premiered in Berlin, and then in New York. In 1960 it won the Vernon Rice Memorial Award. Albee's first and major "hit" was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which opened on Broadway in 1963. It ran for 664 performances and was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and is probably Albee's most well known work. 1966's A Delicate Balance won Albee his first Pulitzer Prize. In 1975, Albee won his second Pulitzer with Seascape, and then his third with Three Tall Women in 1991. Three Tall Women enjoyed a sold-out success in New York and has been staged across the country and around the world. It received Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle. Albee has written 25 plays and over the years has received an impressive number of awards including two Tony Awards. Albee also teaches at the School of Theatre of the University of Houston and gives lectures on his work at colleges around the US.
Holly Stuart Hughes is the editor-in-chief of "Photo District News", the monthly magazine for professional photographers based in New York City.
Playwright Tony Kushner was born in New York City and raised in Louisiana. In addition to his plays, Kushner teaches at New York University and has co-written an opera with Bobby McFerrin. Kushner is best known for Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, a two-part seven-hour play that has won many awards (two Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, two Drama Desk Awards, the Evening Standard Award, the New York Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award). It was also selected one of the ten best plays of the 20th century by London's Royal National Theatre.
Ntozake Shange is a writer, educator, and poet. She was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey on October 18, 1948. Shange graduated from Barnard College in 1970 and entered the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a master's degree in 1973. It was while in graduate school that she adopted her African name. Shange taught writing and took part in poetry readings and dance performances. She taught drama and creative writing at several colleges and universities, including Yale and Howard. In 1983, Shange became associate professor of drama at the University of Houston. Shange wrote For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, a choreopoem that opened on Broadway in 1976. The show won an Obie Award and was nominated for an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy. Shange also wrote the trilogy, Three Pieces, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry in 1981. She also received an Obie in 1981 for her adaptation of Bertold Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. Shange has also published novels, collections of poetry, and a children's book.
