Richard Wesley

Richard Wesley (born July 11, 1945) is an African-American playwright, and screenwriter for television and cinema. He is an associate professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing.

Wesley was born in Newark, New Jersey, to George and Gertrude Wesley, and grew up in that city's Ironbound section. Following high school he studied playwriting and dramatic literature at Howard University, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1967.

He is married to author Valerie Wilson Wesley. As of 2000^[update], he was a resident of Montclair, New Jersey.

He first achieved renown with the production by the New York Shakespeare Festival of his 1971 play Black Terror, which portrayed the story of a black revolution that was to take place in "the very near future". Clive Barnes in The New York Times described the play as a "winner" that "makes the case for black revolution and against black revolution." Wesley was recognized with the Drama Desk Award for the 1971–72 season as most promising playwright for Black Terror, which earned him a $100 check from the president of Ticketron.

In 1975, Wesley created The Past Is the Past, a drama about a black man who meets the father who had abandoned him many years before. The play was revived in 1989 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn's Billie Holiday Theatre, starring John Amos and Ralph Carter.

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