Quiara Alegría Hudes author of Water by the Spoonful

Thursday, October 11, 6pm – Theater

Quiara Alegría Hudes author of Water by the Spoonful, ($14.95 TCG)

Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of Water by the Spoonful, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Water by the Spoonful is the second in a trilogy of plays. The first, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. The third and final installment, The Happiest Song Plays Last, opens at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in April 2013.

Hudes wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights, which received the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical, a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical, and was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist. In its original Off-Broadway incarnation, In the Heights won the Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Musical. The touring companies of In the Heights have performed at Puerto Rico’s Centro Bellas Artes, LA’s Pantages, and Tokyo’s International Forum.

Other works include Barrio Grrrl!, a children’s musical that premiered at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2009 and toured nationally. 26 Miles premiered at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2009 and was published in American Theatre Magazine. Yemaya’s Belly, Hudes’ first play, premiered at Portland Stage Company and received The Clauder Prize.

Hudes’s honors include the United States Artists Fontanals Fellowship, the Joyce Fellowship at the Goodman Theatre, the Aetna New Voices Fellowship at Hartford Stage, the Roe Green Award at the Cleveland Playhouse, and fellowships at Sundance Theater Institute and the O’Neill Theater Center. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and has been honored with a Resolution by the City of Philadelphia.

After graduating from public school in Philadelphia, Hudes went on to receive a B.A. in music cum laude from Yale University and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Brown, where she studied with Paula Vogel. She was recently inducted into the Central High School Hall of Fame–the first Latina and among the first group of women to receive this honor since the school’s founding in 1836.

Hudes is on the board of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. She now lives in New York with her husband and daughter.