By Liz Armstrong
Karen Zacarías is an American playwright, perhaps most known for her play Mariela in the Desert. Debuted at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, the play won the National Latino Playwriting Award.
Other plays include Legacy of Light, The Sins of Sor Juana, Native Gardens, and Destiny of Desire. Adaptations include How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Just Like Us and others. American Theatre hailed Zacarías as one of the most produced playwrights in the United States.
Her plays have been featured by Arena Stage, Goodman Theatre, Round House Theatre, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alliance Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and many more.
The Book Club Play is slightly autobiographical, as her passion for literature is obvious not only in her creation of the play and its characters, but is reflected in much of her other work. She has taken inspiration from works by Maria Ines Fornes, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Ruhl, Lisa Loomer, and others.
In 2026, Zacarías is currently working on an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (which Jen mentions at book club in The Book Club Play) and a Brazilian themed Oliver Twist musical. The New York Times praised her libretto (text of opera or other long vocal work) of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and she is working on a libretto of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Zacarías was born in Mexico and grew up in an artistic family. She said she resisted being an artist for many years, as she saw how “artistic expression could be misused as justification for self-indulgent, self-important, and destructive behavior.” Her grandfather, Miguel Zacarías, was actually a movie director and writer in the 1930s and 40s during “The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema.”
But Zacarías loved literature, and an artistic life was inevitable for the playwright. As a child, she coped with the move from Mexico City to Boston by writing. Zacarías would go home and “create imaginary dialogues and invent backstories for the kids who were mocking her” (Carnegie Foundation).
Once Zacarías was out of college, she said: “[After] I worked a couple years at a Latin American policy nonprofit and knew I could support myself without betraying others that I finally let myself really become a writer.”
Zacarías founded the Young Playwrights Theater. In 1995, she began teaching playwriting classes for children in D.C. classrooms, which turned into a nonprofit organization in 1997. The theater company’s curriculum is currently being used in public schools in Washington, D.C.; VA; MD; New Orleans; Detroit; and Texas.
“I love writing for young people,” Zacarías said. “My strongest playwriting lessons have come in trying to create stories that will resonate with young people–it is a rewarding, hilarious and heartbreaking endeavor to create plays in which kids really see themselves onstage.”
The first playwright-in-residence at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Zacarías has also taught playwriting at Georgetown University.
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the White House Historical Association invited Zacarías to write a family play about the White House. After the playwright included young people in the creation process, the book Chasing George Washington was published by Scholastic with a foreword from Michelle Obama. It was followed by a national tour of the play by the same name.
“Theater is not about offering solutions, but about setting a stage, it’s about listening and it’s about really, at its core, about not feeling alone,” Zacarías said. “When theater works, it’s about community, and when it really works, it’s about communion.”
Zacarías boasts many awards, including the New Voices Award, 2010 Steinberg Citation-Best New Play, Paul Aneillo Award, National Francesca Primus Prize, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play.
In 1991, Zacarías received a BA from Stanford University. In 1995, she attended Boston University for a master’s degree in creative writing. She currently resides in Washington, D.C. with her husband and three children.
