Lynn Nottage, Young Jean Lee, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Receive 2016 PEN Literary Awards

For ninety years, PEN American Center has been working to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to make it possible for everyone to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others. United with the international PEN community, their mission is to bring down barriers to free expression and reach across borders to celebrate, through writing, our common humanity.

As part of the mission PEN confers annual awards of over $150,000 to writers in the fields of fiction, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children's literature, translation, drama or poetry.

Three of Off-Broadway's most thought-provoking and exciting playwrights have been selected by judges Annie Baker, Kirsten Greenidge, and Tracy Letts as the 2016 recipients of PEN Literary Awards for Drama.

Lynn Nottage, has been awarded the Master American Dramatist Award, which comes with a specially commissioned piece of art.

The judges' citation reads, "Lynn Nottage is the Pulitzer prize winning author of RUINED. Her inspiring array of work speaks to the strength of the human spirit within all of us. As with RUINED, Ms. Nottage often draws upon extensive interviews and research as part of her writing process, which results in plays that detail authentic anguish and actualized hope. Her work includes INTIMATE APPAREL, which received American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics Awards, the Obie Award winning FABULATION, BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK, as well as CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY and LAS MENINAS. Ms. Nottage's play SWEAT recently premiered to great acclaim. She has received a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the inaugural Horton Foote Award, and the National Black Theatre Fest's August Wilson Playwrighting Award. In 2004 Ms. Nottage was awarded the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career, but since that time her influence in the American Theatre has widened and deepened and her awe-inspiring body of work demonstrates that she is truly a Master American Dramatist."

Young Jean Lee, whose last Off-Broadway offering STRAIGHT WHITE MEN, was a departure from her less convention pieces like THE SHIPMENT and LEAR won the American Playwright in Mid-Career Award, which comes with a cash prize of $7,500.

The judges write, "Young Jean Lee's work has been challenging and thrilling audiences since her first play opened in 2003. By tackling themes and projects that initially strike her as nightmarish, Ms. Lee writes and directs theater that has a raw, honest vulnerability that the judges think is unprecedented in the American theater. No play she writes is anything like the play that came before, and her treatment of race, gender, and sexual politics onstage is devastatingly astute and subversive. Her dissection of the relationship between the performers and the audience is always strange, scary, and yet remarkably inclusive. The judges can't wait to see what she does next."

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who has both shocked and thrilled audiences with plays like NEIGHBORS, AN OCTOROON and APPROPRIATE won the Emerging American Playwright award, with a cash prize of $2,500.

From the judges: 'Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a young writer of uncommon power. His work is bold, thoughtful, funny, and true. Showing a deftness with different styles and a sharpness in elucidating mature themes, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has already proven, at the age of 32, that he is a writer to whom we must listen and whose future work we anticipate. Though Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has certainly emerged, we see his career as being filled with abounding promise."

Past winners of Award for Master American Dramatist: Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Horton Foote, Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, John Guare, Lanford Wilson, Wallace Shawn, Adrienne Kennedy, A. R. Gurney, Richard Nelson, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, David Henry Hwang, Christopher Durang, Larry Kramer, David Rabe, and Tina Howe

Past winners of Award for American Playwright in Mid-Career: Richard Greenberg, Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Charles Mee, Jr., Tony Kushner, Craig Lucas, Lynn Nottage, Dael Orlandersmith, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Naomi Iizuka, Sarah Ruhl, Nilo Cruz, Theresa Rebeck, Marcus Gardley, Will Eno, Adam Rapp, Kirsten Greenidge, Donald Margulies, and Anne Washburn

Past winners of Award for Emerging American Playwright: Laura Marks and Jennifer Blackmer

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