Sarah Ruhl (born January 24, 1974) is an American playwright, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards. In 2015, she published a collection of essays, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write. Her most recent play, Becky Nurse of Salem (2019) premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She currently serves on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama. In 2018, Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, co-authored by Max Ritvo, was published by Milkweed Editions. Her memoir Smile was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2021. Biography Early life Ruhl was born in Wilmette, Illinois. Her mother, Kathleen Ruhl, studied theater at Smith College and earned a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric from the University of Illinois and became an English teacher, as well as an actress and a theatre director. Her father, Patrick Ruhl, became a marketer of toys, with an appreciation for literature and music. Her older sister, Kate, is a psychiatrist. Beginning in the fourth grade, Ruhl received dramatic training at the Piven Theatre Workshop, in Evanston, Illinois. On the occasion of a 2015 production at Piven of her Melancholy Play, Ruhl credited the institution with teaching her about the role of language and narration in theater. Ruhl attended Interlochen Arts Camp for several summers in her youth. Ruhl had intended to become a poet, but after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University, she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. At Brown University she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English (1997) and Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting (2001). She also spent a year of graduate work studying English literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. Career Playwriting Orlando, an adaptation of the novel by Virginia Woolf,