Doug Wright is an award winning playwright whose plays include I am My Own Wife, for which he won a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize, Posterity, and Quills, for which he won an Obie Award. He has written books for the Tony-nominated musical Grey Gardens, the Drama Desk nomination “Hands on a hardbody”, The Little Mermaid, and War Paint. He adapted and directed August Strindberg’s Creditors for the La Jolla Playhouse in 2009.  Films include the screen adaptation of Quills, which won a Paul Selvin Award and WGA award, and production rewrites for director Rob Marshall, Steven Spielberg and others. He is Fmr. President of The Dramatists Guild and on the Board of The New York Theater Workshop. He has taught or guest lectured at the Yale Drama School, Princeton University, Julliard and NYU.  He lives in New York with his husband, singer-songwriter David Clement.

So, in a way, art becomes a kind of permanent record of human experience in the way that no other phenomenon can. And that's why we have to continue to pay attention to it, at our peril. And, in terms of improving the study of art and integrating it even more richly into our lives, I do think that we have to examine the canon as we perceive it. Because the canon has been controlled largely by white men, white American and European men who have determined what is worthy of study and what is not.

And I think we have to look to find the voices of women and marginalized people because sometimes it's the most disenfranchised people in the culture that are the most articulate about it and most aware of the innate injustice in certain social systems. So I think we really have examine our canon and broaden and deepen it to include more voices.

This is an excerpt of a 7,000 word interview which will be published and podcasted across a network of participating university journals and national arts/literary magazines.