NEW YORK CITY: The Dramatists Guild of America Council has named Kia Corthron the recipient of the 2020 Flora Roberts Award. The award, established 20 years ago, is presented annually to a dramatist in recognition of distinguished work in the theatre and to encourage the continuation of that work.
The Flora Roberts Award is named after the celebrated theatrical agent who represented some of the most prominent playwrights, composers, and lyricists in the American theatre. She was fiercely loyal to her writers and was a tireless champion of their work. After her death, many of her friends and clients raised the funds to endow an award in her honor.
Corthron’s plays include Force Continuum, Megastasis, Breath, Boom, A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, and Cage Rhythm, among others. Her work has been produced in New York at Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theater Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Ensemble Studio Theatre, and in London at the Royal Court Theatre and Donmar Warehouse. Her awards include the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, USArtists Jane Addams Fellowship, McKnight National Residency, and the Simon Great Plains Playwright Award Her debut novel,The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.
Past winners of the Flora Roberts Award include Adrienne Kennedy, Neal Bell, Jonathan Reynolds, William Finn, Michael John LaChiusa, Robert Waldman, Ed Bullins, Craig Lucas, Polly Pen, Michael Weller, Christopher Durang, Philip Kan Gotanda, Arthur Kopit, Charles Fuller, Dael Orlandersmith, Mac Wellman, Charles Busch, and Martha Clarke.
