disappointing thing about this book is that it has to end." During graduate school, Vanderbes wrote a one-act play called "The Applicant" which was produced by the Soho Rep theater in New York. In 2014, she returned to playwriting, and her two-act play, Primating, about primatologists in Africa, was optioned by Tony-award winning producers Jeffrey Richards Associates, . The play revolves around two of the world’s leading primatologists, who reunite at a chimp reserve twenty-five years after a dashed love affair. The headstrong, brainy ex-lovers use what they know about primate behavior to justify their own lives, igniting a full-blown battle of the sexes - and wits - as they pit man against woman and ape against man. The play had its world premiere in August 2021 at the Arkansas Repertory Theater in Little Rock, Arkansas, celebrated by Broadway World as a "very smart, witty play." She also writes for film and television, developing projects with HBO, Netflix, Bravo, TriStar, and Paramount. According to the Hollywood Reporter, in March 2022 she was named an Athena List winner for a biopic she wrote for Paramount. In July 2022, she won a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting/Screenwriting Prize. In November 2022, the Hollywood Reporter announced her as the winner of the Athena Film Festival's Sloan Development prize. She is a Story Editor on Season 22 of NBC's Law & Order. Vanderbes is the recipient of numerous other awards, including a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a New York Public Library Cullman Fellowship, and a Sloan Foundation Book Grant. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Best New American Voices 2000. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Her first investigative non-fiction book, Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims, will be published by Random House and Harper Collins UK in June 2023. Vanderbes was named an NEH Public Scholar for her investigation into the thalidomide scandal. She lives in New York City. References External links New York Times review of The Secret of Raven Point Rumpus Interview with Nation Book Award winner Phil Klay Washington Post review of The Secret of Raven Point Vogue Interviews Jennifer Vanderbes about The Secret Of Raven Point O Magazine Review of Strangers at the Feast Official Jennifer Vanderbes Website BOMB Magazine Interview Leonard Lopate Show Interview