Born in Trussville, Alabama, playwright Rebecca Gilman attended Middlebury College, is a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama, and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1991. Her other plays include Dollhouse, Spinning Into Butter, Boy Gets Girl, Blue Surge (all of which premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre), and The Glory of Living.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prince Prize for Commissioning New Work, the Roger L. Steven Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, and the George Devine Award. She was also named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2001 for The Glory of Living. Chicago Tribune Arts Critic Chris Jones has said of Gilman that "she writes plays with such intriguing plots that the audience finds itself hungry for what is going to happen next…”