Columbia native playwright wins prominent $50k award boasted by many Pulitzer winners
It’s impossible for Donnetta Lavinia Grays to separate her creativity from the place she still thinks of as home: Columbia, South Carolina.
It’s the place that gave her an unshakable Southern accent, shaped her early life experiences, introduced her to theater and made her who she is today — a new winner of a prestigious literary award known for identifying the biggest up-and-coming writing talent in America.
Now a professional playwright and television screenwriter living in Brooklyn, New York, Grays, 43, has just been named one of 10 winners of the 2021 Whiting Awards for emerging writers. The award comes with a $50,000 prize.
“Why would it even cross my mind to think that I would be considered for something like that?” said Grays, who had taken a retreat to rural upstate New York with her wife last week, after the awards were announced. “That tells me that the work that I am doing is resonating in a way that I had hoped, to some degree, and that my community is responding to it. It’s extraordinary and humbling in so many ways.”
A graduate of Spring Valley High School in northeast Columbia, Grays is recognized by the Whiting committee particularly for her works’ “portrayal of family – its complicated manifestations of love, its convoluted sense of responsibility ... we come to know her characters as deeply as anyone in our lives.”
Plays she has written include “Where We Stand,” “Last Night and The Night Before” and “Warriors Don’t Cry.”
The seeds of her talent took root when she was a shy teenager beginning to blossom as an actor in Spring Valley’s drama program, under the direction of Allison McNeely, in the 1990s.
“I always tell people where I’m from. I want to make sure they know this is the city that built me, this is the state that built me,” Grays said. “I didn’t become an actor in New York. I didn’t become a writer in New York. I became those things in high school.”
From Spring Valley to the College of Charleston to the University of California Irvine, Grays learned the ins and outs of theater. Then she took herself to New York City — “Obviously, I’m going to be a Broadway star, so that’s where I’ve got to do it,” she laughs — and began to define herself as not just an actor, but a playwright.
She’s authored at least a dozen plays over the past two decades. Her work encompasses explorations of art, love, integrity and family, and questions about what it means to be a community.
“I write with a sense of love,” Grays said. “I really, really love the people that I write, so I want to take such good care of them, even when they make mistakes or choices I wouldn’t make myself. I want them to come from an instinct of love.”
Beyond the stage, her current endeavor is an upcoming NBC Universal television series, “Joe Exotic,” where she’s working as executive story editor. The limited series, based on the “Tiger King” zookeeper, will feature comedienne Kate McKinnon in the role of Carole Baskin.
The Whiting Awards are given annually by the Whiting Foundation to 10 emerging writers in drama, poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Along with Grays, the 2021 Whiting winners are Jordan E. Cooper and Sylvia Khoury in drama; Joshua Bennett in poetry and nonfiction; Marwa Helal, Ladan Osman and Xandria Phillips in poetry; Steven Dunn and Tope Folarin in fiction; and Sarah Stewart Johnson in nonfiction.
Grays is now in the company of numerous fellow dramatists, novelists, poets and other writers whose recognition by the Whiting Awards would later springboard them to other awards including Pulitzer Prize recognition, widely considered the highest achievement in American literature.
“It’s just a knockout. These are people who I’ve studied,” Grays said.
A professor and mentor of Grays’ at the College of Charleston, Joy Vandervort-Cobb, reminded Grays that she has taught Whiting winners on her theater class syllabi.
Now, Grays is one of them.
This story was originally published April 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
