Playwright

Pearl
Cleage

(she/her)

Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer who serves as the city’s first Poet Laureate. Currently Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre, she has premiered eight plays there, including Flyin’ West, Blues for an Alabama Sky, What I Learned in Paris, and The Nacirema Society. The first of her eight novels, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was a New York Times bestseller. Her praise poem, “We Speak Your Names,” commissioned by Oprah Winfrey in 2005 and written in collaboration with her husband, Zaron W. Burnett, Jr., is performed across the country regularly by those who accepted Cleage’s invitation to “use it, adapt it, pass it on.” Her ten-year performance collaboration with Burnett is the subject of the award-winning documentary Live at Club Zebra directed by Matthew and David Adeboye. Cleage is currently at work on a new play to be performed in Atlanta in 2026.