American · b. 1977
Quiara Alegria Hudes was born in Philadelphia in 1977 to a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish father, and grew up in West Philadelphia taking piano lessons at Settlement Music School. She studied composition at Yale before turning to playwriting. Her Elliot Trilogy follows a Marine home from Iraq: Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue (2006) was a Pulitzer finalist, and Water by the Spoonful, which moves between a recovering addict's online chat room and a family funeral, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012. She wrote the book for In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical of a Washington Heights block, and the screenplay for its 2021 film, as well as the script for the animated Vivo. My Broken Language (2021) is a memoir of growing up between English, Spanish and the Spanglish her aunts and cousins spoke, and of a Perez family whose women practiced Lukumi. Her first novel, The White Hot, was shortlisted for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award.