Browne-Marshall wins grant from Pulitzer Center

National Press Club member Gloria Browne-Marshall received a Pulitzer Center grant to produce a virtual staged reading of her play, “SHOT: Caught a Soul.”

“Shot is about a dead 16-year-old black teen haunting the white officer who shot him,” Browne-Marshall said. The play “speaks to unseen anguish and police rationalizations.”

Browne-Marshall wrote an accompanying essay published by the Milwaukee Courier. “I write across genres,” she wrote because “my community needs all of me.”

"Gloria Browne-Marshall combines her skills as a journalist, educator, and playwright to create a compelling drama and powerful, in-the-moment teaching tool,” said Tom Hundley, senior editor at the Pulitzer Center in a press release.

The Pulitzer Center raises awareness of under-reported global issues through direct support for quality journalism across media platforms and unique education and public outreach programs.

Browne-Marshall has written seven plays and four books.

“My first book was written in Alabama motels when I was a civil-rights attorney,” she said, noting that “some may see a contradiction in being a legal correspondent, attorney, professor and playwright” but she doesn’t because she was inspired at a young age by James Baldwin.  “I was determined to be like Baldwin, a writer, activist and playwright.”

"She Took Justice: The Black Women, Law and Power," Browne-Marshall’s fourth book is scheduled to be featured at a Virtual Book Rap on Thursday, Feb. 18 at 7 p.m. The Virtual Book Rap is sponsored by the Book & Author Group, which aims to produce programs for Club members to promote their recently published works. To receive a link to attend Browne-Marshall’s event, please email Heather Forsgren Weaver at [email protected].

Browne-Marshall has a law degree and is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College. She is a legal correspondent covering Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and the United Nations.