Nathan Patton didn’t grow up in a rural Arkansas town, population 85 — he grew up on the outskirts of that town. That seclusion led to a lot of time spent inside his imagination, writing and drawing his own comic books, or acting out unmade Indiana Jones sequels in the woods and creeks behind his house.

While he’s still inexperienced at adulting, but he did eventually get a job, doing some work in the comics field, and working as a freelance journalist and political cartoonist before eventually deciding to get his MFA in Writing. He’s a former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where he still lives with his wife, son, and dog — all of whom are way cooler than him (for one thing, they never talk about themselves in the third person).

His feature script, Waitress #2, won the 2018 Script Pipeline First Look Project and is a 2019 Nicholl Quarterfinalist.