Awards and Honors
The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter was the winner of the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was also a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and listed on Powell's Books Best Fiction of 2017. The book awarded her the 2017 Bread Loaf Shane Stevens Fellow in the Novel.
Honors for her body of work for the stage include the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, the Horton Foote Prize, the Flora Roberts Award, the United States Artists Jane Addams Fellowship, the Otto Award for Political Theatre, and the Simon Great Plains Playwright Award. She was the 2017 resident playwright of Chicago's Eclipse Theatre, which produced three of her plays.
Other honors include the Lee Reynolds Award, Masterwork Production Award, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Wachtmeister Award, Puffin Foundation Award, Mark Taper Forum's Fadiman Award, AT&T On Stage Award, Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, Callaway Playwriting Award, Delaware Theatre Company Connections Contest winner, and New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award.
Her residencies/fellowships include the MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Creative Arts Residency (Italy), Blue Mountain Center, Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Art Omi, Cill Rialaig (Ireland), Château de Lavigny (Switzerland), Siena Art Institute Visiting Artist (Italy), Dora Maar Fellowship (France), Hedgebrook, Columbia College Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media/Goodman Theatre Fellowship, Hermitage Artists Retreat, Norton Island Retreat, Sundance winter retreat at Ucross, O'Neill Center/National Playwrights Conference, National Endowment for the Arts/TCG, Shenandoah International Playwrights Retreat, Van Lier Fellowship.
She serves on the council of the Dramatists Guild, is a member of the Authors Guild, and is a New Dramatists alumnus.
For television, she was awarded Edgar and Writers Guild Outstanding Series awards as a season staff writer for David Simon's The Wire.
Her animated film Yemen! Saudi Arabia! U.S.! And How We Got This Way!—originally her contribution to her co-produced IMAGINE: YEMEN evening of short plays—was screened at the United Nations Association/UK annual We The Peoples Film Festival in London, and is available on YouTube.