Alumni in the News: June 12, 2023

On June 1, Jennifer Lee ’90, GSAS’98 was named one of eight 2022–23 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award winners. Awardees are nominated by students and faculty, with final selections made by the Executive Committee of Arts and Sciences; Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology.

Tony Kushner ’78 was featured in the May 25 New York Times article “How America’s Playwrights Saved the Tony Awards.” Kushner, known for the Pulitzer-winning play Angels in America, “is a fiery supporter of the [Writer’s Guild of America] strike,” the Times writes, “who freely denounces the ‘unconscionable greed’ of studio bosses and who showed up on a picket line as soon as it began.”

On May 15 it was announced that James Shapiro ’77, the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature, was awarded a Spring 2024 Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin. Shapiro will spend a semester at the American Academy completing his upcoming book Playbook: The Creation and Demise of a Theater for All Americans, which explores the rise and fall of the Federal Theatre in the 1930s.

In February, Emma Buzbee ’21, an eighth-grade humanities teacher at Lafayette Middle School in Brooklyn, was named a 2023 Success Academy Excellence Award winner. The Excellence Awards honor school-based staff who demonstrate a commitment to educational equity for children and families.