The Dramatists Guild Honors Clarence Coo ’10 with Horton Foote Award

Playwriting alum Clarence Coo ’10 was presented with the Horton Foote Award at the Dramatists Guild’s annual awards ceremony on April 29, 2025, at the Broadway restaurant Green Fig.

"It was such an honor and a delight to receive this award the same evening David Henry Hwang received a Lifetime Achievement Award. David was my thesis mentor when I was a playwriting student at [the School of the Arts],” Coo said in a statement.

The Horton Foote Award recognizes dramatists whose work “seeks to plumb the ineffable nature of being human,” according to the Dramatists Guild. This year’s Horton Foote Award was given to Coo and playwright C. A. Johnson. Last year’s recipient was Sanaz Toossi, whose play English was just nominated for the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play.

Coo won the Whiting Award in 2017. He was honored with the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize for his play Beautiful Province (Belle Province), which follows a fifteen-year-old and his English teacher on a road trip to Quebec. In 2023 Coo’s Chapters of a Floating Life won Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Weissberger New Play Award. Coo’s plays are published by Yale University Press, Temple University Press, the New Press and Samuel French.

Clarence Coo was born in the Philippines and grew up in a crowded, multilingual household in Virginia. He writes about language, class, and sexuality. His plays include On That Day in Amsterdam, The God of Wine, The Birds of Empathy, and Beautiful Province (Belle Province). Coo is a New Dramatists alum, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab.