Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his play, Purpose. A current member of the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Advisory Council, Jacobs-Jenkins is a Princeton alumnus from the Class of 2006 and has lectured for both the Princeton Atelier and the Program in Theater & Music Theater.
Purpose explores the complex dynamics and legacy of the Jaspers, an upper middle class African-American family whose patriarch was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement. When the son returns home with an uninvited friend, the family is forced into a reckoning with itself, its faith, and its legacy. The Pulitzer Prize announcement calls Purpose “a skillful blend of drama and comedy that probes how different generations define heritage,” while New York magazine notes, “Purpose channels everything from August Wilson to Tennessee Williams. It is a sparring match, crackling with sharp punchlines, pulling us into an all-out brawl.”
Given to an original, distinguished play by an American author that deals with American life, the Pulitzer Prize comes with a cash award of $15,000. Purpose was selected from the finalist group of plays which included Oh, Mary! by Cole Escola and The Ally by Itamar Moses.
Photo courtesy MacArthur Foundation
Jacobs-Jenkins has been a Pulitzer finalist twice before, in 2016 for his play, Gloria, and in 2018 for Everybody.
Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright and producer. Last June, he received the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play for his play, Appropriate, after it completed an acclaimed, record-breaking, eight-month run on Broadway. Other recent theater credits include The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre, NYC; Almeida Theatre, London), Girls (Yale Rep), Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3), Gloria (Vineyard Theatre), An Octoroon (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). He was showrunner, executive producer, and writer for HULU/FX’s drama series, Kindred, based on Octavia E. Butler’s novel.
Currently on faculty at Yale University, Jacobs-Jenkins serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council and on the boards of Soho Rep, Park Avenue Armory, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. Additional honors include a USA Artists fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. He is currently writing the book for the upcoming stage adaptation of Purple Rain.
In October 2017 as part of A Festival of the Arts, Jacobs-Jenkins premiered Girls, a new, commissioned adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae that was performed in Wallace Theater to celebrate the opening of the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus. In addition to working with Princeton students and fellow alum Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06 on Girls, he has returned to Princeton either in person or virtually for several lectures and conversations. In spring 2015, Jacobs-Jenkins taught “Intermediate Playwriting” for the Program in Theater, returning to the faculty again in 2021 to co-teach the Princeton Atelier course “Darkness and Light: Writing, Lighting, Blackness and Whiteness” with Program Director and Professor of the Practice Jane Cox.
Next spring at McCarter’s Berlind Theatre, students in the Program in Theater & Music Theater will stage a production of Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance directed by Lecturer in Theater Vivia Font.
In addition to Jacobs-Jenkins’ win, 2020-22 Princeton Arts Fellow Danez Smith was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for their collection, Bluff: Poems.
Banner image: Production photo from Girls by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06, presented in Wallace Theater in October 2017 as part of A Festival of the Arts at Princeton. Photo by Larry Levanti.
