Jen Silverman is a playwright, novelist, poet, and screenwriter. Their plays include Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth, MCC, Southwark Playhouse London); The Moors (Yale Rep, Playwrights Realm); The Roommate (Humana Festival, Williamstown, Steppenwolf, South Coast, Long Wharf) and Witch (Writer’s Theatre, Geffen, Huntington). Their plays have been produced internationally in Australia, the UK, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Spain, and elsewhere.
Silverman is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves, the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House), and the poetry chapbook Bath, selected by Traci Brimhall for Driftwood Press. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. They wrote The Miranda Obsession as a narrative podcast for Audible/ Vice, starring Rachel Brosnahan. They also write for TV and film.
Silverman is a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Space on Ryder Farm, and the Playwrights Center. Honors include The Helen Merrill Award, the Yale Drama Series Award, the Lilly Award, and Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. They are a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for Prose and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for Drama.
At MacDowell in 2022, Silverman wrote the first draft of their second novel for Random House. During previous residencies, Silverman worked on the plays Phoebe in Winter, Dangerous House, and All The Roads Home, stories included in The Island Dwellers, and poems included in Bath.
Portrait by Zackary Canepari
