Marisela Treviño Orta is a third-generation Mexican American playwright and poet from Lockhard, Texas. She coins herself as an “accidental playwright”. She was trained in poetry, earning an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Yet she began writing plays after becoming that resident poet for the Teatro Jornalero, a Latin theater company with an emphasis on social justice issues. There she found that it was easier to touch on social justice themes in plays rather than in poetry. She’s an alum of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, the Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwright Initiative, a founding member of the Bay Area Latino Theater Artists Network, and a member of the Latinx Theater Commons’ National Steering Committee. She is also a former Core Writer at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and a member of the Goodman Theater's 2018/2019 Playwrights Unit. Some of her notable pieces include Braided Sorrow, Heart SHaped Nebula, The River Bride, and Somewhere.