Maddox Pennington

Maddox Pennington (they/he) is a nonbinary writer, professor, and stand-up comic originally from the Cherokee Nation; they received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University, and their debut bibliomemoir, A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontes Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women’s Work was published by Hachette Books in 2017. Currently they teach college writing at the University of Southern California, with topics related to Queer studies, Native studies, Disability studies, and Empathy and Monsters. Their play LOVE CHICKEN premiered at the 2022 Hollywood Fringe Festival, where it was a Best Comedy nominee, and won the Theater Theatre Podcast Playwright Award. Embers Borne West their play about Native migration and intergenerational belonging, was featured in the 2022 First Look Reading Series of the Moving Arts MADLab; the second play in the Muldrow Cycle, Central Standard Time, will be workshopped at the Native Voices Festival at the Autry Museum of the American West summer 2023. They are directing ANNEX, a dark comedy about mental illness, queer family and magical realism, for its #HFF23 world premiere at the Zephyr Theatre in LA.