Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl (born January 24, 1974) is an American playwright, poet, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Melancholy Play (2001) Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), Dead Man's Cell Phone (2007), and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009). These works and others have been produced on and off Broadway and the West End.

Among numerous awards and honors, Ruhl has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Whiting Award, and the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award. She has twice been a finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2005, 2010) and been nominated for Tony Award for Best Play (2010). In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name at the Metropolitan Opera. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards.

In 2018, Milkweed Editions published Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, which Ruhl co-authored with the late Max Ritvo. Ruhl subsequently adapted the book into a 2023 stage play, which was named a New York Times Critic's Pick. Her memoir Smile was published by Simon & Schuster, and listed as one of Time Magazine's "100 Must-Read Books of 2021." She is currently the Premiere Writer-in-Residence at Signature Theatre Company. Since 2015, Ruhl has served on the playwriting faculty of the Yale School of Drama.