Who Are the Playwrights

Clarence Coo

Alumni Playwright

2012 — 2019

Clarence Coo is a recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award and the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize. His plays include Beautiful Province (Belle Province)The Birds of EmpathyChapters of a Floating LifeThe God of WineOn That Day in Amsterdam, and People Sitting in Darkness. His work has been developed at JAW at Portland Center Stage, Fault Line Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Lark's Playwrights' Week, New York Theatre Workshop, Ma-Yi Theatre, New Dramatists, Second Generation, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Mu Performing Arts, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Round House Theatre, East West Players, the Mark Taper Forum, the Young Playwrights Festival, and the Kennedy Center. His work has also been published by Yale University Press, Temple University Press, the New Press, and Samuel French. Honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Arena Stage Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship, an NEA Access to Artistic Excellence Grant, a Kennedy Center commission, and a Larry Neal Writers’ Award. He received his MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, a 2016-2017 Playwrights Realm Fellow, a 2015-2016 Rita Goldberg Playwrights' Workshop Fellow at the Lark, and a 2012-2013 Dramatists Guild Fellow. He is also the manager of academic administration of Columbia’s MFA Writing Program.