Finalist: Gloria, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
A play of wit and irony that deftly transports the audience from satire to thriller and back again.
Winners
Prize Winner in Drama in 2016:
Lin-Manuel Miranda
A landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible.
Drama
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2016:
Stephen Karam
A profoundly affecting drama that sketches the psychological and emotional contours of an average American family.
The Jury
The Jury
Peter Marks(Chair)
drama critic
Ayad Akhtar*
playwright
Stephanie Arnold
author, professor emerita of theatre
Anne Marie Welsh
theater critic, script editor
Linda Winer
drama critic
Winners in Drama
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
Annie Baker
A thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage.
Ayad Akhtar
A moving play that depicts a successful corporate lawyer painfully forced to consider why he has for so long camouflaged his Pakistani Muslim heritage.
Quiara Alegría Hudes
An imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq war veteran working in a sandwich shop in his hometown of Philadelphia.
2016 Prize Winners
William Finnegan
A finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a distinguished writing career.
T.J. Stiles
A rich and surprising new telling of the journey of the iconic American soldier whose death turns out not to have been the main point of his life. (Moved by the Board from the Biography category.)
Peter Balakian
Poems that bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a "man of two minds" -- and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.