Quiara Alegría Hudes
Author, Composer and Playwright
2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful. Her play Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and has been performed around the country and in Romania and Brazil.
She is an American bi-racial playwright and composer. She wrote the book for the musical In the Heights. She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful. Her play Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and has been performed around the country and in Romania and Brazil.
Hudes was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother. They raised her in West Philadelphia, where she began composing music and writing. She also studied at the Mary Louise Curtis Branch of Settlement Music School, taking piano lessons with Dolly Krasnopolsky. She has stated that although she is of “Puerto Rican and Jewish blood”, she was “raised by two Puerto Rican parents”. Her step-father was a Puerto Rican entrepreneur. She graduated from Central High School. She studied music composition at Yale University, where she earned her B.A., and playwriting at Brown University, earning an M.F.A. She is a resident writer at New Dramatists and a previous Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. Hudes is a visiting professor in the theater department at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut.