Drama professor Erica Stevens Abbitt will discuss award-winning playwright Naomi Wallace in a free public lecture Wednesday, January 8.

Wallace, who splits her time between homes in her native Kentucky and England’s Yorkshire, is a two-time recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, an Obie Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

The French national theatre incorporated her play One Flea Spare into its permanent repertoire in 2009, making her only the second American (after Tennessee Williams) so honoured. Her other works include In The Heart of America,  Slaughter City, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, The War Boys, and The Hard Weather Boating Party.

Wallace received the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2013, with a citation that credited her plays as “muscular, devastating, and unwavering.”

Professor Stevens Abbitt’s lecture is presented by the Humanities Research Group as part of its Martin Wesley Series, and will begin at 4 p.m. in McPherson Lounge, Alumni Hall.