Quiara Alegría Hudes
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a distinguished playwright and memoirist known for her impactful storytelling that explores themes of cultural identity, family struggles, and personal resilience. Born and raised in Philadelphia to a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish father, Hudes's diverse background greatly influences her work. She gained recognition for her collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the award-winning Broadway musical *In the Heights*, which highlights the vibrant community life in Manhattan. Hudes is also celebrated for her *Elliot Trilogy*, which includes plays such as *Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue* and *Water by the Spoonful*, the latter winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012.
Her writing often blends various cultural settings and musical elements, drawing from her own experiences and those of her family and friends. Beyond theater, Hudes has ventured into writing essays and children's literature, emphasizing social issues and cultural representation. In addition to her artistic achievements, she is a professor at Wesleyan University and actively engages in initiatives that amplify the voices of underrepresented communities. Hudes's memoir, *My Broken Language*, published in 2021, further delves into her Puerto Rican heritage and upbringing in Philadelphia, receiving critical acclaim. Overall, her multifaceted career reflects a deep commitment to storytelling that resonates with diverse audiences.
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Subject Terms
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Playwright and author
- Born: 1977
- Place of Birth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Contribution: Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of the musical In the Heights (2007, with Lin-Manuel Miranda), the play Water by the Spoonful (2011), and the memoir My Broken Language (2021), among other works.
Background
Quiara Alegría Hudes was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she attended Central High School. She was a member of the Philadelphia Young Playwrights, an organization founded in 1986 that provides education and guidance for Philadelphia students interested in playwriting. Hudes’s first play was produced by the Philadelphia Young Playwrights when she was in tenth grade, and she has since been named a member of the board of directors for the organization.
Hudes’s mother is Puerto Rican and her father is Jewish, and this blend of ethnicity and culture became a major focus of her writing. Though she writes in English, Hudes grew up in a bilingual household and spent considerable time in Puerto Rico, learning to appreciate the unique culture of the island.
Hudes received her BA in music from Yale University and spent several years supporting herself as a touring musician. She has said that it was her mother who encouraged her to concentrate on writing, telling her that she had a duty to tell the stories of her family, many members of which were struggling with poverty and addiction. Hudes earned her MFA in playwriting at Brown University, where she studied with eminent playwright Paula Vogel.
Career
Hudes’s first play, Yemaya’s Belly (2007), premiered at the Portland Stage Company and received the Clauder Prize. The play tells the story of a Cuban boy searching for a way to escape the poverty of his rural life after his community is disrupted by a natural disaster.
Hudes wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights, which won the 2008 Tony Award for best musical. Hudes was nominated for the Tony Award for best book in 2008 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. In the Heights won the Outer Critics Circle Award for best musical when the play premiered Off-Broadway. The play, which features music and lyrics by award-winning composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, takes place on a block in Manhattan, showing how a local bodega, salon, and taxi dispatch office are connected to the surrounding community.
Hudes gained fame as an independent artist for her three-play series known as the Elliot Trilogy. The first of the three plays, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, tells the story of an Iraq War veteran, Elliot Ortiz, contemplating his father’s service in the Vietnam War and considering whether to leave for a second tour of duty in Iraq. The short play debuted in 2006 at a small theater and was a critical success, becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Water by the Spoonful (2011), the second play of the Elliot series, finds Elliot having returned from Iraq and attempting to rebuild his life. In what has become characteristic of her work, Hudes sets the story across a number of unique cultural environments, from a Philadelphia funeral home to a cybercafé in Japan and a Puerto Rican waterfall. Water by the Spoonful was a critical and popular success, winning the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The third play in the series, The Happiest Song Plays Last (2013), features a cast of characters engaged in a search for self-realization amid different but connected environments, from North Philadelphia to a film set in Jordan during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. While The Happiest Song Plays Last is more of a romance than the other two plays in the series, it still delves into intimate issues of cultural identity and personal struggles in coming to terms with difficult life experiences.
Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy established her as one of the top playwrights of her generation. In each of the three plays, Hudes blends locations and cultures in her stories and often experiments with the atmosphere by using unexpected combinations of music, ranging from traditional Puerto Rican songs to classical selections from Johann Sebastian Bach.
Hudes loosely based the characters and situations in the Elliot series and her other plays on the experiences of family and friends, but she tried to be respectful of their privacy. She shared the $10,000 cash prize for her Pulitzer with the individual who inspired the character of Elliot and with another relative whose story inspired the recovering-addict theme in the plays.
In 2015 Hudes joined the faculty at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, as the Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater. By early 2020 she was a visiting scholar in theater there.
Hudes's next Off-Broadway play, Daphne's Dive (2016), is set in a family-run bar and deals with themes of inclusion, exclusion, and adoption. Like many of her earlier works, it was inspired by childhood acquaintances and settings. Collaborating with lyricist Erin McKeown, Hudes later created the book and lyrics for Miss You Like Hell (2018), a road trip story featuring an undocumented immigrant and her teen daughter. The play—and the book in particular—was nominated for multiple Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel Awards. Hudes went on to adapt In the Heights (2020) for film and to reunite with Miranda for the animated musical Vivo, for which she wrote the screenplay.
In addition to scripts, Hudes has written essays and a children's book, Welcome To My Neighborhood! A Barrio ABC (2010). With her sister, theater manager Gabriela Sanchez, she has given speeches about casting people of Latin heritage, and she curates Emancipated Stories, a social-media project through which incarcerated people share one-page stories. In 2021 Hudes published a memoir titled My Broken Language. The book, which tells the story of her family's Puerto Rican heritage and growing up in Philadelphia, was a critical success, landing on many Best Books of 2021 lists, including BookPage, NPR, and BookRiot, as well as being nominated as a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal.
Impact
In addition to her Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards, Hudes has received the United States Artists Fontanals Fellowship, the Aetna New Voices Fellowship at Hartford Stage, the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship, the Goodman Theatre's Joyce Fellowship, and residencies at New Dramatists and the Pershing Square Signature Center. When The Happiest Song Plays Last premiered in Chicago, mayor Rahm Emanuel declared April 27, 2013, to be Quiara Hudes Day, and seventy-five Chicago residents were given a free pass to see all three plays in the Elliot Trilogy at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.
Personal Life
Hudes lives in the Washington Heights section of New York City with her husband, Ray Beauchamp, a public defender. They have two children, a son and daughter.
Bibliography
“Bio.” Quiara Alegría Hudes, www.quiara.com/. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Hudes, Quiara Alegría. "Quiara Alegria Hudes on Her Pulitzer Prize Win for Water by the Spoonful." Interview by Mallika Rao. HuffPost, 18 Apr. 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/quiara-alegria-hudes-pulitzer-prize‗n‗1433396.html. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Hudes, Quiara Alegría. “What Pulitzer Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes Loves about Chicago.” Interview by Catey Sullivan. Chicago, 22 Mar. 2013, www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/April-2013/Inside-the-Mind-of-Quiara-Alegria-Hudes/. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Johnson, Reed. “Quiara Alegría Hudes, Post-Pulitzer, Eyes the Next Chapter.” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 2012, articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/10/entertainment/la-et-cm-pulitzer-playwright-20120610. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Oxfeld, Jesse. “Hot Water: What Makes Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Play Pulitzer-Worthy?” Observer, 8 Jan. 2013, observer.com/2013/01/hot-water-what-makes-quiara-alegria-hudess-play-pulitzer-worthy/. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Rocha, Julia. "Quiara Alegría Hudes on Writing Through Grief and Joy." Latino USA, 28 Mar. 2023, www.latinousa.org/2023/03/28/quiaraalegriahudes/. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Soloski, Alexis. “Adventures of a Barrio Girl.” The Village Voice, 23 Jan. 2007, www.villagevoice.com/2007/01/23/adventures-of-a-barrio-girl/. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Soloski, Alexis. “A Family’s Story Spans a Trilogy, and Beyond.” The New York Times, 28 Nov. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/theater/for-quiara-alegria-hudes-plays-are-family.html. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.
Thompson, Shayne Rodriguez. "'In the Heights' Writer Quiara Alegria Hudes' New Memoir Is About Growing Up Puerto Rican in Philly." HipLatina, 21 June 2021, hiplatina.com/quiara-alegria-hudes-broken-language/. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.