Rate My Professor Darren Canady

Darren Canady is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas, specializing in playwriting within the Creative Writing program. He also holds a courtesy appointment as Professor in African and African American Studies. Originating from Topeka, Kansas, Canady draws from a family legacy of expressive storytelling shaped by Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement. His dramatic works fuse this oral tradition with the distinctive culture of African American life in the Midwest, delving into themes of family, history, social change, multiculturalism, urban life, and ethnic borderlands across the American heartland. A faculty member at KU since 2010, Canady's creative output centers on breathing dynamic life into narratives of the Black Midwest.

Canady's playwriting has earned him distinguished awards and residencies, including the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award from the Alliance Theatre in May 2006 for False Creeds, the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from The Juilliard School and Lincoln Center Theater, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights. He has held residencies at America-in-Play, Primary Stages’ Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group, and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. His selected plays, staged nationally and internationally, encompass Brothers of the Dust (Congo Square Theatre Company, Chicago), False Creeds (Alliance Theatre, Atlanta), No Kerchiefs (The BE Company, New York, March 2009), You’re Invited! (Old Vic New Voices, Old Vic Theatre, London), One Night Dickie Didn’t Come Home (Helen Hocker Center for the Performing Arts, Topeka), He Was Mine But Then You Took Him (New York University), Black Idiot Box and No Sparkle in the Dust (Scotch ‘n’ Soda Theatre, Carnegie Mellon University), Muddy the Water (The BE Company, New York), How Theo Changed His Name (Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra), and One Night at Fern’s (Quo Vadimus Arts, New York), among others. Canady's contributions enrich contemporary theater with poignant explorations of Black experiences in the Midwest.