TheGrio’s 100: Lynn Nottage, a warrior writer

Lynn Nottage calls herself a warrior writer. The New York playwright inspires with honest portrayals of strong “warrior women,” drawn from the characters in her own life, like her grandmother, who also had a knack for telling stories.

“I grew up in a family of storytellers,” Nottage during a NPR interview. “My grandmother was a phenomenal storyteller, and I think if she lived in a different generation, she probably would have written for the stage or she would have written novels.”

While still in high school, Nottage wrote her first play, The Darker Side of Verona, about a black Shakespearean company. Following her education at Brown University and Yale School of Drama, Nottage took a four-year detour from the theater into human rights work with Amnesty International.

Through her experience with the organization, she got first hand experience seeing social injustices around the world, particularly against women. After viewing photos of battered Congolese women, Nottage felt compelled to tell their stories and finally returned to playwriting, newly centered on activism.

She has gone on to pen acclaimed plays that focus on women and African-Americans, including “Intimate Apparel” in 2003, “Fabulation”, or “The Re-Education of Undine” in 2004 and “Crumbs from the Table of Joy” in 1995. Her latest play, “Ruined,” follows the story of a group of Congolese women surviving the country’s civil war; the work won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in April.

Nottage was also awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007, a testament to her writing and theatrical legacy.

Last spring, when she spoke before a United States Senate subcommittee hearing about her research on war and sexual violence in Africa for her play “Ruined,” the activism of this warrior writer came full circle.

Article by Talia Whyte>