Length: 4 parts.

Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s wildly original debut novel, Getting Mother’s Body, follows pregnant, unmarried Billy Beede and her down-and-out family in 1960s Texas as they search for the storied jewels buried—or were they?—with Billy’s fast-running, six-years-dead mother, Willa Mae. Getting Mother’s Body is a true spiritual successor to the work of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker—but when it comes to bringing hard-luck characters to ingenious, uproarious life, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage with no one.

"Parks has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way.... She's passionate and jokey and some kind of genius."--Vogue A collection of plays and essays by one of America's premier playwrights. Includes the essays "Possession," "from Elements of Style," and "An Equation for Black People Onstage," and the plays Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, Betting on Dust Commander, Pickling, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Devotees in the Garden of Love, and The America Play.

The first major study of this unique voice in contemporary drama. Suzan-Lori Parks confirmed herself as one of the most exciting and successful playwrights of her generation when winning the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, making her the only African American woman to win the award.

The latest addition to the Michigan Modern Dramatists series offers an indispensable guide to Parks's dramatic works, taking a close look at her major plays and placing them in context. Deborah R. Geis traces the evolution of Parks's art from her earliest experimental pieces to the hugely popular Topdog/Underdog to her wide-ranging forays into fiction, music, and film."--pub. desc.

On November 13, 2002, the author decided to write a play every day for a year. She began that same day. The result, completed exactly one year later, is this collection of 365 plays.