Cherríe Moraga & Richard Wesley Named 2024 Recipients of the Legacy Playwright Awards

Esteemed American Playwrights Cherríe Moraga and Richard Wesley have been announced as the 2024 recipients of the Legacy Playwright Awards. 

The industry-wide Legacy Playwrights Initiative shines a spotlight on the achievements and influence of playwrights whose work deserves greater visibility, including those who have fallen out of the public eye. LPI offers a pathway to rediscovery for honorees and their writing and provides financial support. 

The Initiative has several components: two monetary Legacy Playwright Awards; advocacy for professional theater production of their work and the reissuing of previously published plays; programs to raise awareness within the theater field and in universities; and filmed interviews highlighting the Legacy Playwrights' careers.

“Perhaps the most important aspect of this DGF award are the three words, ‘writers who create.’  I have never grown tired of them—the gift creative writing has provided for me in this life of seventy-two years,” Moraga said upon learning of the honor. “I am deeply moved to be recognized as such, especially in the context of theater. It is never an easy road to write as a queer, a chicana, a non-new yorker; but to write for the embodied word — spoken, heard, and received— forever energizes the spirit. This honoring gives one hope for it reaffirms that the generations need one another. Gracias.”

A California-based writer, Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, essayist and memoirist who initiated her public writing life as the co-editor of the 1981 seminal feminist text, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. As a political and literary essayist, Moraga has published Native Country of the Heart – A Memoir (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (Duke); and Loving in the War Years, The Last Generation; and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood  (Haymarket Books, Chicago). Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the Barnard College Medal of Distinction, and both the American Studies Association’s and Lambda’s Lifetime Achievement Awards, among many other honors. 

As a playwright, she has earned two Fund for New American Plays Awards, the NEA’s Playwrights’ Fellowship, as well as a Drama-logue, Critics Circle, and the Pen West Award. In 2021, Moraga received the Distinguished Career Theater Artist Award from the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation in New York City.  She has published three volumes of plays: HEROES & SAINTS & OTHER PLAYS; THE HUNGRY WOMAN/HEART OF THE EARTH; and WATSONVILLE/CIRCLE IN THE DIRT. Her most recently produced play, MATHEMATICS OF LOVE,  premiered at BravaTheatre in San Francisco in 2017.  Her most current work is a  feature-length film script, SEÑORA DE LOS BLUES —a feature-length film script on the life of Mexican “Ranchera” singer, Chavela Vargas. Commissioned by Level Forward with Killer Content/Abigail Disney and Aubin Pictures.

Originally, mentored by María Irene Fornés in INTAR’s playwrights lab in the early 1980s, Moraga has gone on to mentor a full generation of now published writers and professional playwrights at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, who credit Moraga as one of their most influential teachers.  Today, she is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“I am deeply honored by this generous recognition of work I've created and inspired to continue pursuit of my plays to come,” Wesley said.

Richard Wesley was born in Newark, New Jersey and graduated from Howard University in 1967. He studied Playwriting under the tutelage of Owen Dodson and Ted Shine. A member of the New Lafayette Theater from 1970 through 1973, he served as Managing Editor of its Black Theater magazine. He was awarded a Drama Desk Award for his 1971 stage play, THE BLACK TERROR. His 1978 play, THE MIGHTY GENTS, ran briefly on Broadway. His 1989 play, THE TALENTED TENTH, brought him his fourth AUDELCO Award for outstanding play.  In 2013, he was commissioned by the Trilogy Opera Company of Newark, NJ to write the libretto for the opera, PAPA DOC, with music composed by Dorothy Rudd Moore, and adapted from an essay by Edwidge Danticat. Other librettos for Trilogy include: FIVE, with music composed by Anthony Davis, KENYATTA, with composer Trent Johnson, SCOTT, GARNER and GRAY SAYS JIMMY BALDWIN, composed by DWANE FULTON and BOOKER T and W.E.B., composed by Julius Wilson. A new version of FIVE, called, THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE, was performed June, 2019, by the Long Beach Opera Company at the Warner Theater in San Pedro, California. Wesley’s most recent play, AUTUMN, received its premiere at the Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick in April of 2015. A subsequent production was produced in New York by the Billie Holiday Theater in 2016 and received the AUDELCO Award for Dramatic Production of the Year. 

Wesley has shared two NAACP Image “Best Picture” Awards for the motion pictures, UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT and LET’S DO IT AGAIN, both of which starred Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby. Among his other motion pictures: NATIVE SON (1984), with Victor Love, Elizabeth McGovern, Matt Dillon and Akosua Busia, and the musical drama, FAST FORWARD (1985).

In television, Wesley’s has scripted, THE HOUSE OF DIES DREAR, (PBS, 1984); MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE (NBC, 1992), with Curtis McClarin, Anna Maria Horsford, Georg Stanford Brown, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.; MANDELA and DE KLERK (Showtime, 1997), with Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine, and co-wrote the scripts for BOJANGLES, starring Gregory Hines (Showtime, 2002) and DEACONS FOR DEFENSE (Showtime, 2003), with Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Silverman and Ossie Davis. DEACONS FOR DEFENSE was the recipient of a “Black Reels Best Picture” Award from the Foundation of African American Films. He has also written episodes for the series FALLEN ANGELS (Showtime, 1996) and ONE HUNDRED CENTER STREET (A&E Cable Networks, 2000 and 2001). 

Citations Wesley has received include: The Castillo Award for Outstanding Writing in Political Theater (2013), The Pioneer Award from the National Black Theater of New York (2015), The August Wilson Playwriting Award from the National Black Theater Festival (2015), The Distinguished Playwriting Achievement Award from the Texas State University Black and Latino Playwrights Conference (2018), The August Wilson Award from the National Black Writers Conference (2018) and The Grace L. Jones Award for Lifetime Achievement in Playwriting from AUDELCO (2022). 

Wesley is currently an Associate Professor in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing, Chair of the Selection Committee for the Black Film Festival of the Newark Museum of Art, Advisor to the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers University in Brooklyn, NY, a Guest Lecturer at the Advanced Playwrights Workshop for the New Federal Theater and a Member of the Board at the Manhattan Theater Club. He is married to the novelist, Valerie Wilson Wesley.

Past recipients of the Legacy Honor include the late Ed Bullins, Carlyle Brown, Frank Chin, Constance Congdon, Migdalia Cruz, Philip Kan Gotanda, and Milcha Sanchez-Scott.

This year’s recipients will be recognized at the Dramatists Guild Foundation’s Gala on Monday, October 28, at the historic Ziegfeld Ballroom. 

The Legacy Playwrights Initiative is supported by the Dramatists Guild Foundation and a leadership grant from Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. To donate to the Legacy Playwrights Initiative and learn more about the Legacy Playwright Awards, visit www.legacyplaywrightsinitiative.org.