Description:

Join us for the special in-person conversation between playwright, screenwriter and showrunner Molly Smith Metzler, creator of the current limited Netflix series MAID and award-winning author, poet, memoirist and University of Chicago faculty member Rachel DeWoskin, who is currently writer-in-residence at Northwestern's RTVF Department. This event, sponsored in part by the Bindley Family Endowed Fund for Visiting Artists, is presented by EPICS in partnership with the MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage. Open to the entire NU community.

BIOS

Molly Smith Metzler is a playwright and screenwriter from Kingston, New York. She is the creator and showrunner of the limited series Maid (Netflix), which she executive produced alongside John Wells and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment for WB. Her TV credits include three seasons of Shameless (Showtime), two seasons of Casual (Hulu) and Orange Is the New Black (Netflix). In film, Metzler has written features for Made Up Stories, Disney, Universal, and Fox 2000. Currently, she is adapting the graphic novel Dan and Sam for Universal with Marc Platt/Automatik producing. Metzler is also an award-winning playwright and alum of The Juilliard School, where she was a two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center. Her play Cry it Out has had over a hundred productions and was the winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Playwrighting (2018), the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award Citation (2018), and the Ovation Award for Best New Play (2018). Her other plays (including Elemeno Pea, The May Queen and Carve) have been produced at The Kennedy Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Humana Festival/Actors Theatre of Louisville, South Coast Rep, Detroit Public Theatre, Northlight Theatre (Chicago), Studio Theatre (DC) and more. Currently, she is writing a new play for The Kennedy Center’s 50th anniversary season, co-commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club. Molly Smith Metzler is a playwright and screenwriter from Kingston, New York. She is the creator and showrunner of the limited series Maid (Netflix), which she executive produced alongside John Wells and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment for WB. Her TV credits include three seasons of Shameless (Showtime), two seasons of Casual (Hulu) and Orange Is the New Black (Netflix). In film, Metzler has written features for Made Up Stories, Disney, Universal, and Fox 2000. Currently, she is adapting the graphic novel Dan and Sam for Universal with Marc Platt/Automatik producing. Metzler is also an award-winning playwright and alum of The Juilliard School, where she was a two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center. Her play Cry it Out has had over a hundred productions and was the winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Playwrighting (2018), the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award Citation (2018), and the Ovation Award for Best New Play (2018). Her other plays (including Elemeno Pea, The May Queen and Carve) have been produced at The Kennedy Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Humana Festival/Actors Theatre of Louisville, South Coast Rep, Detroit Public Theatre, Northlight Theatre (Chicago), Studio Theatre (DC) and more. Currently, she is writing a new play for The Kennedy Center’s 50th anniversary season, co-commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club. Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin Random House, 2019); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Blind (Penguin Random House, 2015); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005); and the poetry collection, Two Menus (The University of Chicago Press, 2020). She has received a National Jewish Book Award, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, an American Library Association's Alex Award, and an Academy of American Poets Award, among others. Three of her books, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Banshee, and Someday We Will Fly, are being developed for television or feature film. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. DeWoskin teaches fiction at the University of Chicago and is an affiliated faculty member in Jewish Studies, East Asian Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.