Naomi Wallace

Naomi Wallace is an American playwright living in England. Throughout her celebrated and incendiary career Wallace has explored the role of politics and power in shaping human experience, be it in seventeenth-century London during the Great Plague (One Flea Spare, 1995), among black communist organizers in 1930s Alabama (Things of Dry Hours, 2009), or in the parallel dramas of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars (In the Heart of America, 1994). Though her work can be dark and almost brutal in its vision, Tony Kushner maintains that Wallace is “outrageously optimistic. She seems to believe that the world can change. She certainly writes as if she intends to set it on fire.” In addition to her more than twenty stage plays, Wallace has written screenplays for the films Lawn Dogs (1997), The War Boys (2009), and Flying Blind (2012, with Bruce McLeod). Wallace has received many accolades for her work, including two Susan Smith Blackburn Prizes, an Obie Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship.