Katori Hall

Biography

Katori Hall(born May 10, 1981) is an American playwright and screenwriter from Memphis, Tennessee. Hall's best known works include the hit television series P-Valley, the Tony-nominated Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and plays such as Hurt Village, Our Lady of Kibeho, Children of Killers, The Mountaintop, and The Hot Wing King, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Hall's parents moved the family from Raleigh, North Carolina, to a predominantly white neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, when she was five years old. She graduated from Craigmont High School as the first Black valedictorian in the school's history, and received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing. As a student, she was a resident of John Jay Hall. Hall was initially a student in the theater department, where she took classes with fellow student Kelly McCreary. Eventually she switched majors because she felt the faculty and students were inhospitable to her perspective and writing. She was awarded top departmental honors from the university's Institute for Research in African-American Studies.