Hilary Bettis is a critically-acclaimed playwright, TV writer, and filmmaker. She grew up raising horses and chickens in rural Colorado, with her Chicana mother and Southern Methodist father. Her work is a culmination of these cultures, exploring the American identity through a working-class Latiné lens. 

Her plays have been developed and produced all over the US and Mexico, including, Roundabout Theatre, New Georges, The Sol Project, Yale Rep, Miami New Drama, Studio Theatre, Alley Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, La Jolla Playhouse, Lark’s playwright workshop at Second Stage, O’Neill NPC, amongst others. She’s currently under commission at Roundabout Theatre, Miami New Drama, Untitled Theatricals, and is writing a musical with Grammy-winning composer Julio Reyes Copello. 

Bettis won the 2019 Writer’s Guild of America Award for her work on the Emmy Award-winning FX series THE AMERICANS. She was nominated for an Emmy for the Hulu miniseries THE DROPOUT. She’s currently writing on a new Apple series starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and has multiple TV shows in development at Peacock, Amazon, and MGM. She’s an alumni of the Sundance Institute Episodic TV Lab, a graduate of The Juilliard School, a board member of New Georges, a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and a proud member of the WGAEast. She lives in NY with her husband, dog, and two children.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Maybe Bird, and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Jennifer received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Jennifer teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the Literary Assistant to the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco. She will teach a Poetry Workshop at the Michener Center in the Spring of 2024.