Who Are the Playwrights

Jen Silverman

Resident Playwright

2015 — 2024

Jen Silverman is a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. 

Plays include: Spain (2ST); The Moors (Yale Rep, Playwrights Realm); Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth, MCC Theater, Southwark Playhouse London); The Roommate (Humana Festival, Williamstown, Steppenwolf, South Coast, Long Wharf, etc); Witch (Writer’s Theatre, Geffen, Huntington), and Highway Patrol (The Goodman). Their plays have been produced internationally in Australia, the UK, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Brazil, Spain, and elsewhere.

Books include the debut novel We Play Ourselves (named one of the best books of the year by Buzzfeed; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), story collection The Island Dwellers (finalist for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), and new novel There’s Going to be Trouble forthcoming from Random House in April 2024. Jen’s poetry chapbook Bath was selected by Traci Brimhall for Driftwood Press. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Sun, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. 

Silverman wrote The Miranda Obsession as a narrative podcast for Audible, starring Rachel Brosnahan. They also write for TV and film, including Tales of the City (Netflix), Tokyo Vice (HBO/Max) and the short Troy which has screened at festivals including Tribeca, Sundance, Aspen, OutFest, and Cannes. Silverman is a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and a Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris. Honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim.