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The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama
For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Purpose, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

A play about the complex dynamics and legacy of an upper middle class African-American family whose patriarch was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement, a skillful blend of drama and comedy that probes how different generations define heritage.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins accepts the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

Purpose

By

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Broadway production trailer.

Purpose, the gripping and hilarious new drama from Tony Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by two-time Tony Award winner Phylicia Rashad, is “a thumping, riveting, guns-blazing, major new American play” (NY Daily News).

This electrifying production is an intimate and intriguing behind-the-scenes look at the influential Jasper family. And like all families, there are cracks beneath the surface. When the son returns home with an uninvited friend, the family is forced into a reckoning with itself, its faith, and its legacy.

-- from the 2024-25 Broadway season production page

Biography

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright and producer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. He received the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play for APPROPRIATE, which recently completed an acclaimed, record-breaking, 8-month run on Broadway. Other recent theatre credits include THE COMEUPPANCE (Signature Theatre Company, NYC; Almeida Theatre, London); GIRLS (Yale Rep); EVERYBODY (Signature Theatre); WAR (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3); GLORIA (Vineyard Theatre); AN OCTOROON (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience); and NEIGHBORS (The Public Theater). He currently teaches at Yale University and serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council and on the boards of Soho Rep, Park Avenue Armory, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. Additional honors include a USA Artists fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. He is currently writing the book for the upcoming stage adaptation of PURPLE RAIN.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2025:

Cole Escola

A zany portrait of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln’s family life whose outrageous humor also serves as an empathetic celebration of anyone who’s been marginalized or misunderstood.

Itamar Moses

A timely drama about activism, conflicting expectations, and moral responsibility on a college campus, probing American identity and the contradictions within progressive politics, using richly drawn characters with a deep emotional resonance.

The Jury

David Henry Hwang(Chair)

Playwright; Professor of Theatre Arts in the Faculty of the Arts, Columbia University

Tanya Barfield

Co-Director, The Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program, The Juilliard School

Rebecca Gilman

Playwright and Artistic Associate, Goodman Theatre

Helen Shaw

Staff Writer, The New Yorker

José Luis Valenzuela

Director, Latino Theater Company, Los Angeles Theatre Center

Winners in Drama

2024

Eboni Booth

A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person’s life and enrich an entire community.
2023

Sanaz Toossi

A quietly powerful play about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam in a storefront school near Tehran, where family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life.
2022

James Ijames

A funny, poignant play that deftly transposes "Hamlet" to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.
2021

Katori Hall

A funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.
See All Drama

2025 Prize Winners

National Reporting

Staff of The Wall Street Journal

For chronicling political and personal shifts of the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, including his turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
See All 2025 Winners