Ariel Stess Wins 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize For KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA

Playwright Ariel Stess will receive one of the world’s most prestigious playwriting awards, the Yale Drama Series Prize, for her play, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA.

Stess’s play was selected by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning playwright who has been on the Yale faculty since 2021, in his first year judging the competition. Jacobs-Jenkins recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Purpose and was also named one of TIME’s Top 100 Influential People.

This play demonstrates how storytelling can be an act of resistance, intimacy, and liberation. This is exactly the kind of bold, necessary storytelling that the David Charles Horn Foundation is proud to support!

Francine Horn, director of the David Charles Horn Foundation

On October 30, 2025, Stess will be honored at Yale Schwarzman Center with a staged reading of KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA and the conferral of the $10,000 David Charles Horn Prize. Long Wharf Theatre will be a partner in this celebratory event for a second consecutive year. The highly anticipated play will be published by Yale University Press, which collaborates with the David Charles Horn Foundation and Yale Schwarzman Center to administer the prize and bring each year’s winning play to print.