Naomi Wallace
Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work. Her Finborough Theatre productions include And I And Silence, which subsequently transferred to Signature Theater, New York City. Other theatre productions include In the Heart of America (Bush Theatre), Slaughter City (Royal Shakespeare Company), One Flea Spare (Public Theater, New York City), The Trestle at Pope Lick Creekand Things of Dry Hours (New York Theatre Workshop), The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East(Public Theater, New York City), and Night is a Room (Signature Theater, New York City).
Naomi has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize twice, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, the Obie Award and the Horton Foote Award. She is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts development grant. In 2013, Naomi received the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, and in 2015 an Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her play One Flea Spare was recently incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theatre, La Comédie-Française. Only two American playwrights have been added to La Comédie’s repertoire in two hundred years, the other being Tennessee Williams.
“You can't break my heart. It's made of water.”
“I once had a lover and his arms were so strong that my skull was crushed in his grip. With his bare hands he plunged between my ribs and took hold of my heart. A wafer between his fingers it dissolved. Sometimes I wake up in the dark and stand in the hall and I can feel the cold draft pass freely through my chest as though there were nothing there.”
“Our lives are but a splash of water on a stone, nothing more. Then I am the stone on which they fell, and they have marked me. So beware, because I loved them, and they have marked me.”