In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer. Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s correspondence, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.
Sarah Ruhl is the playwright of In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play, a cycle; Dead Man’s Cell Phone (winner of the Helen Hayes Award); and, most recently, Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a midcareer playwright. Her collection of essays 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. She is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the chapbook Hymn to Life. A new collection, The Problem of the Many, is forthcoming next year. A Guggenheim fellow, he has published poems in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is Director of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.