Pittsburgh knows her as a playwright, especially of "Topdog/Underdog," for which she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama and which had a compelling 2004 production at City Theatre.

		Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks appears at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Drue Heinz Lecture Series, Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland. Tickets: $18 ($8 for students with ID); 412-622-8866.

But Suzan-Lori Parks told the Post-Gazette in 2004, "I don't know if I'm a theater person. I think I'm a writer."

And it is as a writer that she comes to Pittsburgh tomorrow, to appear at the Carnegie Musical Hall in the Drue Heinz Lecture Series presented by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.

She's made a number of such appearances. "I call them lectures, but they're really not lectures, they're more fun. I'm going to talk about writing and living and art -- well, 'art,' what a word, I mean writing, the process of writing.

"I'm going to read from my work and probably tell a few corny jokes. I'll talk about how I got where I am. I might sing a song from [her novel] 'Getting Mother's Body' and maybe accompany myself on the guitar. My favorite part is the Q&A."

She was talking from her home in Los Angeles, and suddenly there was a noisy commotion. It was "the cat," whom she identified as "a black polydactyl called Hound Dog," named for Hound Dog Taylor, the blues guitarist; Lamb Chop, her white pit bull, is named for the Shari Lewis puppet.

If in person Parks is anything like she is on the phone, tomorrow's audience is in for a treat. Ebullient is the word: funny, enthusiastic.

Right now, the project that most absorbs her is "the Ray Charles thing." She's been hired to write a Broadway musical -- the story of his life, with music, based on "Ray," the 2004 film.

"I'm having fun," she says, having been given "access to everything he recorded, not just the songs he wrote, everything -- 'Alabamy Bound,' crazy country stuff, a lot they couldn't fit into the movie."

And she claims to have the perfect musical collaborator in Charles himself: "He's been so great -- generous, giving, funny and very much the lady's man. ... Ray Charles is pretty much taking up most of my time."

But she hasn't forgotten playwriting. Indeed, she's deep into planning an ambitious production of "365 Days, 365 Plays." As that suggests, starting on Nov. 13, 2002, she wrote a play a day for a year. And starting this coming Nov. 13, this cycle of plays will premiere in seven cities, simultaneously, for a year -- one play a day.

A lot of the plays are short. The object was to write one every day. "I'd wake up and see the news that Johnny Cash had died, so I'd write a play for Johnny Cash. Or I was on a book tour, standing in the airport security line at 5 a.m., so I'd write the play right there, about standing in line. ... The process of writing a play a day is about living and being alive and embracing what happens."

The plan is to involve many theaters in each of seven cities, tentatively New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Atlanta and Chicago. In New York, for example, the Signature Theatre might do one week's plays, then the New Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center or Woman's Project each performing seven days a week. There's also been talk of ending the year's cycle at the August Wilson Theater in New York with a 24-hour free reading of all the plays.

Parks spoke of her extraordinary experience, interviewing August Wilson for American Theatre magazine on the day the news broke that he was terminally ill.

"I was in tears," she says. They had previously met several times. "He was every inch a king. He was always tremendously funny and kind to me. And August Wilson didn't have to be generous and kind -- there are tons of writers out there who are meanies.

"He's the biggest thing in a lot of our lives. What he did was extraordinary and necessary, two things that rarely happen together. But if all the world's a stage, so was his life: His exit was so beautiful and poetic."