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Quiara Hudes  

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Known for "In The Heights;" Author Known for "My Broken Language"

Quiara Alegría Hudes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of "Water By the Spoonful"; author of a memoir, My Broken Language; and screenwriter for the major motion picture In the Heights. Previously, she wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical and Hollywood blockbuster "In the Heights" and authored other plays and musicals that have been produced around the world. Her notable essays include "High Tide of Heartbreak" in American Theater Magazine and "Corey Couldn’t Take It Anymore" in The Cut.

In opposition of the carceral state, Hudes and her cousin founded Emancipated Stories, a platform where people behind bars can share one page of their life story with the world. As a barrio feminist and joyous mischief maker, Quiara y su hermana created the Latinx Casting Manifesto.

Speech Topics

A Woman's Journey

Hudes absorbed the stories of her second-grade educated grandmother, the spiritual teachings of her priestess mother, and the shrewd advice of her powerful female mentors, and forged a literary path all her own. In her own plays she has delved into the female body and spirit while in her life she has balanced changing diapers, building a marriage, service to the community, and leadership at the top of her field. In a searing, sensual, and personal presentation, Hudes discusses the spiritual and intellectual components of her feminine self and the wisdom she inherited from those who came before.

The Latino Artist Today

How do you capture the essence of the wildly diverse, almost undefinable “Latino artist” of today? Through jokes, politics, statistics, anecdotes, and poetic passages, Hudes attempts to define the undefinable next wave of American art.

Art and Commerce

How does an artist put food on the table? How do foundations, donors, and institutions help artists on their wildly unpredictable creative journeys? The needs of the artistic process--freedom, trial and error, long-term exploration--often conflict with the needs of foundations and institutions--return on investment, fiscal year budgeting, concrete reporting. With blatant honesty Hudes dissects the finances of a creative life and discusses how artists and their supporters can forge more organic and beneficial partnerships.

A Writer’s Many Selves

Hudes grew up in an improbably diverse setting--a childhood and adolescence where many nationalities and religious practices intersected as a daily matter of course. How did she find the connective tissue between Vietnamese and Ethiopian neighbors, street performance artists, Quakerism, Santeria and Western classical music to forge a literary voice all her own? In a nation that is increasingly diverse and where check-boxes are incomplete tools of understanding, this bicultural artist finds energy and a new kind of American identity in the connective tissue between her many selves.

News

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Quiara Alegria Huedes Talks ...
New York, NY – Playwright Quiara Alegría Huedes, the writer behind the celebrated Broadway musical "In The Heights" and who won the Pulitzer Prize last year ...
Hot Water: What Makes Quiara Alegría Hudes's Play Pulitzer-Worthy ...
Settling in to watch Water by the Spoonful, Quiara Alegría Hudes's complicated but neat play about family, drugs, Iraq and a few other things, one must reckon ...

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