Nilo Cruz is a playwright whose work has been produced widely around the United States and Europe. In 2003 he won the Pulitzer Prize and the Steinberg Award for Drama for his play Anna in the Tropics and was nominated for a Tony. Cruz is also recognized as a brilliant librettist of operas and oratorios, and as an imagistic director of plays. He taught at University of Iowa, Brown University, NYU and Yale University. He received an honorary doctor of letters from Whittier College. In 2009 he won The Helen Merrill and The Laura Pels Mid-career Playwriting Award as well as the Fontanals-Cisneros USA Fellowship in literature.