Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl is an acclaimed memoirist, poet, and one of the United States’ most preeminent playwrights. She is a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Whiting Award winner, and Tony Award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and off Broadway, nationwide, and internationally, where they’ve been translated into over fourteen languages.

Sarah’s plays include In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play; The Clean House; Eurydice; For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage; The Oldest Boy; Stage Kiss; Dear Elizabeth; Passion Play; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Melancholy Play; Orlando; Late: A Cowboy Song, and a translation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Her play Eurydice – hailed by the New York Times as one of the 25 best American plays of the past 25 years – was developed into an opera with music by Matthew Aucoin and debuted at The Metropolitan Opera in 2021.

In addition to her plays, Sarah is the author of two poetry collections, an epistolary collaboration with the late poet Max Ritvo, Letters from Max, and the essay collection 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her 2021 memoir Smile: The Story of a Face, about her decade-long struggle with Bell’s Palsy and her reckoning with her identity as a patient, wife, mother, and artist, was a People Best Book of the Year, one of TIME magazine’s must-read books of 2021, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

Originally from Chicago, Sarah received her M.F.A. from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has received the Steinberg award, the Sam French award, the Susan Smith Blackburn award, the Whiting award, the Lily Award, a PEN Award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur Award.

Sarah teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.