Sarah Ruhl is a playwright and writer of other things. Her 15 plays include "In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)," "The Clean House" and "Eurydice." She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee and the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship.

Her plays have been produced on- and off-Broadway, around the country, internationally and have been translated into many languages. Her book 100 ESSAYS I DON'T HAVE TIME TO WRITE was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other books include LETTERS FROM MAX, with Max Ritvo, and 44 POEMS FOR YOU.

She has received the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Samuel French Award, Feminist Press Under 40 Award, the National Theater Conference Person of the Year Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Whiting Award, a Lily Award, and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for mid-career playwrights.

She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tony Charuvastra, who is a child psychiatrist, and her three children.

Photo Credit: Gregory Costanzo

Books by Sarah Ruhl

Smile: A Memoir

by Sarah Ruhl - Memoir, Nonfiction

With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients see spontaneous improvement and experience a full recovery. Like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky 10 percent. And for a woman, wife, mother and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior bring significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face --- one that, while recognizably her own, is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions.