Her work is now taught at drama colleges across the country, and she was the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is a pioneer of historically sensitive and linguistically complicated theater. Donald and Francis McMillian Parks gave birth to Parks on May 10, 1963, in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Her father was an Army sergeant who worked on the nuclear weapons site and her mother was a housewife who had college degrees in psychology and education. They divorced when Parks was four years old and she lived with her mother in Georgia until she was eight. Thereafter, she moved with her mother to Washington, D.C., where they lived in public housing. Parks said she did not know her biological father and only met her maternal grandfather once before he died when she was five years old. Parks began performing at an early age. When she was seven years old, she appeared with her school's stage crew in a production of The Pajama Game. She went on to study theatre at Boston University before moving to New York City to try her hand at acting. There she received critical acclaim for her role in Tony Award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. The role earned her a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. Later, she became one of the leading actresses in the original Broadway cast of Larry David's comedy-drama I'm Not Rappaport.