Just announced is word that Quiara Alegría Hudes's WATER BY THE SPOONFUL is this year's recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play premiered at the Hartford Stage in October of 2011. 

The official release notes that "For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000). Awarded to "Water by the Spoonful," by 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. Also nominated as finalists in this category were: “Other Desert Cities,” by Jon Robin Baitz, a taut, witty drama about an affluent California couple whose daughter has written a memoir that threatens to reveal family secrets about her dead brother, and “Sons of the Prophet,” by Stephen Karam, a masterly play about a Lebanese-American family that blends comedy and tragedy in its examination of how suffering capriciously rains down on some and not others."

In the play, "Somewhere in Philadelphia, Elliot has returned from Iraq and is struggling to find his place in the world again and put aside the demons that haunt him. Somewhere in a chat room, recovering addicts forge an unbreakable bond of support and love. The boundaries of love, family and community are stretched across, time, generations and cyberspace as birth families splinter and online families collide in this captivating new drama. "

"Water By the Spoonful" is a recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New American Plays award.

Best known for writing the book for Broadway's IN THE HEIGHTS, winner of four Tony awards including for Best Musical, Hudes will give a talk and answer questions from the audience at City Tech. In the Heights also earned her the Lucille Lortel Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. She has been called "one of the most important playwrights of her generation" (Atlanta Journal Constitution) with "a confident and arresting voice" (The New York Times).

Hudes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2007 for her critically-acclaimed play, ELLIOT, A SOLDIER'S FUGUE. The New York Times called ELLIOT "that rare and rewarding thing: a theatre work that succeeds on every level while creating something new." She recently made Latina Magazine's list of Top 100 Latinos of the Year, as well as the cover of American Theatre Magazine. Her play Water By the Spoonful will premiere at Hartford Stage this fall. Another play, The Happiest Song Plays Last, will debut at the Goodman Theatre later this season.

Her plays have been published in numerous anthologies and have been produced around the around the world, including Centro de Bellas Artes (Puerto Rico), International Forum (Tokyo), Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, DC), and Pantages Theater (Hollywood, CA). Her work is published by Dramatists Play Service, Scholastic Inc. and American Theater Magazine.

Hudes recently received a United States Artists Fontanals Fellowship as well as a Resolution from the City of Philadelphia honoring the writing she has done about her hometown. She is a resident playwright at New Dramatists in New York and was previously a Joyce Fellow at the Goodman Theatre, as well as a two-time fellow at the Sundance Theater Institute, and a resident playwright at the O'Neill Theater Center. After attending public school, she studied music composition at Yale and received her MFA in playwriting from Brown.