Marsha Norman

Marsha Norman recently retired after 25 years co-directing the Playwright Program at the Juilliard School. Her students have won 3 Pulitzer Prizes, 2 Macarthur Grants, and numerous other gifts and awards. They currently run or write for fully a third of the TV shows currently being made and teach at NYU, Brown, etc. For the last five years, she has also taught Musical Book at Yale. Her own writing began in 1977 with Getting Out, followed by the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ’night, Mother. She also won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and Hull-Warriner and Drama Desk Awards for that play. In 1992, she received Tony and Drama Desk awards for her musical book of The Secret Garden. She also wrote the books for the Broadway musical, The Color Purple, for which she received a Tony nomination, and ten years later, another Tony for Best Revival of a Musical. She wrote the book for The Bridges of Madison County, and a musical version of Trumpet Of The Swan. She won a Peabody Award for her writing on the HBO television series, In Treatment, and has received both Emmy and Grammy nominations.