Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1965

Rebecca Gilman was born in Trussville, Alabama, in 1965 and studied at Middlebury College in Vermont. Later, she returned to her home state and gained her undergraduate degree from Birmingham Southern College. Then she attended the University of Virginia, majoring in English, because she thought she might be interested in teaching. However, she soon discovered that her real passion was writing. After receiving her master's degree at Virginia, she fought hard and eventually made it into the prestigious writers' program at the University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA in playwriting.

Her writing began with a play she wrote when she was only eighteen years old, about a group of disgruntled employees in a doughnut shop who suffocate their boss in a vat of dough. Many of her early plays were never produced. To support her writing in those early years, Gilman took...