Quiara Alegría Hudes Wins 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Water By the Spoonful

Quiara Alegría Hudes has been awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water By the Spoonful. Hudes is the surprise winner of the coveted award over finalists Jon Robin Baitz (Other Desert Cities) and Stephen Karam (Sons of the Prophet). The Pulitzer is given “for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life,” and includes a prize of $10,000.

Water By the Spoonful is described by the Pulitzer board as “an imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq war veteran working in a sandwich shop in his hometown of Philadelphia.” The play centers on a soldier who struggles to put aside his demons while his mother, a recovering addict, battles demons of her own. Water By the Spoonful premiered at the Harford Stage on October 26, 2011, starring Ray Anthony Thomas and directed by Davis McCallum.

Hudes received a Best Book Tony Award nomination for In the Heights, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008. She was also a 2007 Pulitzer finalist for A Soldier’s Fugue, the first play in a trilogy set in her hometown that continues with Water By the Spoonful. 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. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.

The 2012 Pulitzer Prize drama jury consisted of critics Steven Leigh Morris, Rohan Preston and Linda Winer, theater professor David Savran and 2011 winner Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park).