AUGUST WILSON

Award-winning Black Playwright

By writing plays about black people in the twentieth century, Wilson hopes people can learn to improve the future by learning more about the past. His plans are to write a play recreating the black experience for each decade of the century.

August Wilson was born in 1945 with the name Frederick August Kittel. When his father left them he took his mother Daisy's last name. He was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a predominently black neighborhood. At 13 years of age he moved to predominantly white Hazelwood, but he did not forget the unique culture of the Hill, especially when he had to suffer the racial taunts in Hazelwood.

Though he left school in ninth grade when a teacher suspected him of plagiarizing, Wilson wanted to become a poet. He continued his education at the library, and had poems published in black publications at the University of Pittsburgh. He and another black man, Rob Penney, founded the Black Horizons Theater Company in Pittsburgh in 1968, though he had to work several jobs to support himself. After moving to St. Paul to write scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota, he finally began writing plays. When he started going back to his boyhood days in the Hill District using common, everyday, people as his characters, his career took off.

His big break and first Broadway play was "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom". His next play was "Fences", for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. He won another one for "The Piano Lesson", as well as a Tony Award and five New York Drama Critic's Awards, among others. His newest play to arrive on Broadway was King Hedley. In 2003 he was awarded the prestigious Heinz Award.

Wilson is married to the former Constanza Romero, and has a daughter, Sakina Ansari, by a previous marriage.