What This Place Makes Me

Seven award-winning plays by rising stars of contemporary theater herald a profound shift in what it means to be an American, an immigrant, and an artist on today’s stage. Shayok Misha Chowdhury | Public Obscenities, shortlisted for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Hansol Jung, 2018 Whiting Award–winner | Wolf Play Martyna Majok, 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winner | Sanctuary City Mona Mansour, 2020 Kesselring Prize–winner | The Hour of Feeling Charlie Oh | Coleman ’72, 2021 Paul Stephen Lim Award–winner Mfoniso Udofia, 2021 Horton Foote Award–winner | Sojourners Jesús I. Valles, 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize–winner | a river, its mouths This groundbreaking collection of works by first- and second-generation immigrants unites seven exhilarating new voices of Lebanese, Nigerian, Korean, Bengali, Polish, and Mexican descent. Echoing beyond the stage, their stories draw on common experiences of displacement, alienation, and the sense of living in suspension; sometimes torn between two worlds, sometimes plummeting into the spaces between them. Amid tangled relationships, vengeful landscapes, and buried family mysteries, something universal flickers; the search for safety and the promise of home. Both haunting and galvanizing, What This Place Makes Me will be a vital touchstone for years to come.