American playwright and teacher Paula Vogel was BOTD in 1951. Born in Washington, D.C. to a middle-class family, she studied at Bryn Mawr and Cornell University, and began writing plays in the late 1970s. The death of her brother Carl from an AIDS-related illness in 1988 profoundly affected her life and work, and became the subject of her 1992 Obie Award-winning off-Broadway play The Baltimore Waltz, starring Cherry Jones and Joe Mantello. She is best known for her 1997 play The Summer I Learned to Drive, a mordantly funny story about a young woman’s relationship with her sexually abusive uncle. Praised for its complex examination of gender dynamics and the legacy of child sexual abuse, the play won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Vogel’s other works include The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Oldest Profession and Indecent. A distinguished teacher, she led the playwriting programme at Brown University from 1984 to 2008, and taught drama at Yale University until 2012. In 2017, she and fellow playwright Lynn Nottage publicly criticised New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley for his perceived preference for straight white male writers, which is thought to have contributed to Brantley’s resignation three years later. She is married to gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling.