Quiara Alegría Hudes wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights. In 2008, In the Heights received the Tony Award for Best Musical, a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical, and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. In its original Off-Broadway incarnation, In the Heights won the Lucille Lortel Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. Currently in its third year of touring, Heights has made stops at Puerto Rico’s Centro Bellas Artes, LA’s Pantages, and Tokyo’s International Forum.

Hudes’ play Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007. It opened at New York’s Culture Project and transferred to a special run at El Museo del Barrio. Her play Water By the Spoonful premiered at Hartford Stage Company in 2011. Barrio Grrrl! premiered at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2009 and toured nationally. 26 Miles premiered at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2009 and was published in American Theatre Magazine. Yemaya’s Belly, Hudes’ first play, premiered at Portland Stage Company and received The Clauder Prize, The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, and the KCACTF Latino Playwriting Award.

Hudes’ works are published by Dramatists Play Service, Scholastic Inc., Rodgers and Hammerstein, and in numerous anthologies.

Hudes is the inaugural recipient of the Roe Green Award, given by the Cleveland Playhouse to a nationally-recognized playwright. Other honors include a United States Artists Fontanals Fellowship as well as a Resolution from the City of Philadelphia. She is a resident playwright at New Dramatists in New York. Previously she was a Joyce Fellow at the Goodman Theatre, the Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage, a two-time fellow at the Sundance Theater Institute, and a resident playwright at the O’Neill Theater Center.

After graduating from public school in Philadelphia, Hudes went on to receive a B.A. in music cum laude from Yale University and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Brown, where she studied with Paula Vogel. She recently returned to Philadelphia as the first Latino and second woman to be inducted into the Central High School Hall of Fame since the school’s founding in 1836.

Hudes is on the board of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. A proud Philly native, she now lives in New York with her husband and daughter.

photo credit: Joseph Moran