The Vineyard Theatre Company, which first produced Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive Off-Broadway in 1997, administers the Vogel Award, which is presented annually to an emerging playwright who shows promise.

The Vogel Award comes with a cash prize and artistic development support over the 2011-12 season. Jacobs-Jenkins will be presented with the award during a June 9 ceremony at the National Arts Club. Colman Domingo (The Scottsboro Boys, Well, A Boy and His Soul) and Donna Hanover (Picked) will host.

"We are delighted to present the 2011-12 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins," artistic director Douglas Aibel and associate artistic director Sarah Stern said in a joint statement. "Branden is a young playwright who brings an original and powerful voice to his work in the theatre, with plays that are ambitious and intimate, funny and heartfelt. His work explores big questions - about identity, race, performance, change, America - with creative and intellectual vigor."

Jacobs-Jenkins' racially charged play Neighbors made a highly publicized New York debut as part of the 2010 Public/LAB. It received its Los Angeles premiere last fall. His plays also include The Octoroon: An Adaptation Of The Octoroon Based On The Octoroon, Appropriate and The Change. Jacobs-Jenkins' works have also been presented at New York Theatre Workshop, PS122, Soho Rep, New Dramatists, Theater Bielefeld in Bielefeld, Germany and the National Theatre in London. He is currently at work on commissions from Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3 and Yale Repertory Theater.

Previous Vogel Award recipients include Kara Lee Corthron (Etched In Skin On A Sunlight Night, Ladybug Gonna Getcha), Tarell Alvin McCraney (The Brother/Sister Plays, Wig Out!) and Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, The Monster at the Door). For more information visit www.vineyardtheatre.org.