David Mamet is an award-winning screenwriter and playwright, as well as a director, a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. He has written the screenplays for more than twenty films, including Homicide (which he also directed), Wag the Dog, and the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross. His work on Jewish subjects includes That Old Religion, Bar Mitzvah, Passover and Five Cities of Refuge, a Torah commentary written with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. He lives in California.