"[3] Parks was raised Catholic and attended high school in West Germany, where her father, a career officer in the United States Army, was stationed.

[3][5] After returning to the U.S., her family relocated frequently and Parks went to school in Kentucky, Texas, California, North Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont.

She studied under James Baldwin, who encouraged her to become a playwright; Parks was initially resistant to writing for theater, believing it was elitist and cliquey.

[10][11][12] Parks was inspired by Wendy Wasserstein, who won the Pulitzer in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles,[13] and by her Mount Holyoke professor, Leah Blatt Glasser.

Her first play The Sinner's Place, which she wrote for her senior project at Mount Holyoke, was rejected for production by her college's drama department as they considered it too experimental since she wanted to have dirt on the stage during the performance.

[21] When her second play, Betting on the Dust Commander, first premiered, it ran for three nights in a bar in Manhattan's Lower East Side called Gas Station.

[22] It is a short, one-act play set in Kentucky, centering around the lives of a couple, Mare and Lucius, who have been married for 110 years.

As the play goes on, we discover that Dust Commander's Derby is responsible for bringing Mare and Lucius together, and through the couple's discussion of him they think back over their many years of memories together.

Author Joshua Wolf Shenk argues that Parks does not judge Lincoln in this play, but rather enjoys bringing him into the other characters' lives and seeing how they are affected.

In days of Greek drama, they had Apollo and Medea and Oedipus – these larger than life figures that walked the earth and spoke – and they turned them into plays.

Directed by Jo Bonney, the cast featured Sterling K. Brown, Louis Cancelmi, Peter Jay Fernandez, Russell G. Jones, and Jacob Ming-Trent.

[31] From September 15 to October 22, 2016, the play had its London premiere at the Royal Court in a transfer of the Public Theatre production directed by Jo Bonney.

The cast featured Steve Toussaint, Nadine Marshall, Leo Wringer, Sibusiso Mamba, Tom Bateman, and Jimmy Akingbola.

The Pulitzer committee wrote: "A distinctive and lyrical epic about a slave during the Civil War that deftly takes on questions of identity, power and freedom with a blend of humor and dignity.

[37] Plays for the Plague Year, an anthology of plays and songs, described by The New York Times as "Parks's diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and a coincident string of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers", was scheduled for a November 2022 premiere at Joe's Pub, with Parks onstage singing and starring.