Pearl Cleage

Pearl Cleage is an award-winning playwright, essayist, journalist, poet, and fiction writer whose work is often set in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood. Her debut novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, became a New York Times bestseller and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 1998. In 2013 Cleage was named playwright in residence at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, which had previously commissioned her plays Blues for an Alabama Sky and Flyin’ West. In the 1970s Cleage worked as a speechwriter and press secretary for Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson and became a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her papers are housed in the Emory University archives. Education: Spelman College