Playwright

Allison
Engel

Allison Engel has been a newspaper reporter for the Des Moines Tribune, San Jose Mercury and Pacific News Service and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She has also been a political speechwriter and aide for former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and lieutenant governor Sally Pederson. In Iowa, she was active in the Des Moines Playhouse, serving as president and head of play selection. She has been a food columnist for Saveur, an architecture columnist for Renovation Style, and has written for many other national publications. She recently spent five years as director of communications at USC before becoming the associate director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the university. She received an MA in screenwriting from USC in 2009. She is married to Scott Kirkpatrick, and they have two children, Miles and Nora.