Molly Bernard is most recognizable for her role as Lauren Heller on Younger. Additionally, she starred in and executive produced the indie film Milkwater, which premiered at the Brooklyn Film Festival, and recently completed production on the Amazon film Master, opposite Regina Hall, and the independent feature Lone Star Bull. Since 2018, Bernard has co-starred as medical student Elsa Curry on NBC’s Chicago Med. Her additional television credits include Transparent, Alpha House, High Maintenance, Blindspot, Otherhood, Sully, Pay it Forward, and The Intern.

Sarah Mezzanotte recently reprised her role in Lincoln Center's remounting of Sarah DeLappe's award-winning play The Wolves and appeared in the Broadway revival of Six Degrees of Separation. She also starred in the world premiere of Dry Land, which garnered a New York Times Critics' Pick. Her film and television credits include Chambers on Netflix, Drunk Bus, The Blacklist, Blue Bloods, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Royal Pains, Blame, and the Amazon pilot The Interestings. Mezzanotte is a graduate of The Tisch School at NYU.

Cynthia Nixon made her film debut in Little Darlings at 12 and her Broadway debut at 14 in The Philadelphia Story. Since then she’s appeared in more than 40 plays, scores of films and TV shows, and won 2 Emmys, 2 Tonys, and a Grammy. Best known for her role as Miranda on HBO’s Sex and the City, she co-stars in the sequel series And Just Like That…. Nixon appeared on numerous "Best Actress of 2018" lists for her portrayal of Emily Dickinson in Terrence Davies' much-lauded film A Quiet Passion. In 2018 she also ran for Governor of New York state. She currently co-stars in Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age on HBO.

Petronia Paley is an actress, director, playwright, and teacher. Her film and television credits include Annie Hall, Damages, Blue Bloods, Modern Love, New Amsterdam, Little America, Billions, Faces, 2 Days in New York, and Naomi & Eli’s No-Kiss List. On Broadway, she has been seen in The First Breeze of Summer with the Negro Ensemble Company, On Golden Pond, and The Gin Game. Her one-woman play, On the Way to Timbuktu, won an Audelco Award for Best Solo Performance. She received an Audelco Directing Award for Looking for Leroy at New Federal Theatre.

Michael Potts is an actor whose extensive screen career includes performances in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Prodigal Son, The Wire, True Detective, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Allegiance, Bored to Death, Flight of the Conchords, Show Me a Hero, and Oz. On Broadway, he originated the roles of Mafala Hatimbi in The Book of Mormon and Mr. Hawkins in The Prom, and was in companies of The Iceman Cometh, Jitney, Grey Gardens, and Lennon. Additional New York stage credits include The Tempest, Richard III, for which he earned a Falstaff Award, The Persians, Twelfth Night, and The American Play, for which he earned an Obie Award. Upcoming projects include Night Music, Rustin, Rounding, and Music of Revenge.

Alison Stewart is the host of All Of It with Alison Stewart, WNYC’s daily live afternoon program about culture, and the monthly book club Get Lit with All Of It. She began her media career as a producer/reporter for MTV News’ breakthrough presidential campaign coverage “Choose or Lose,” which earned her a Peabody Award. She has spent more than two decades reporting and has anchored her own news programs on NPR, PBS, ABC, and MSNBC. Stewart is a contributor with The Atlantic LIVE and PBS NewsHour, and the author of two books: First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School and Junk: Digging Through America’s Love Affair With Stuff.

Louise Erdrich is the author of more than a dozen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Night Watchmen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary, which was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and Conjunctions. She teaches fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, a National Book Award finalist for fiction; the memoir In the Dream House, winner of The Rathbones Folio Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; and the comic series The Low, Low Woods. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Vogue, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts and was an Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Machado was recently commissioned by Symphony Space for their anthology of short stories, Small Odysseys.

Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His debut short story collection, Lot, was published in 2019 and his first novel, Memorial, was published in 2020, both by Riverhead Books and Atlantic Books UK. He’s received a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honor, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award, an Ernest J. Gaines Award, an International Dylan Thomas Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, a Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, and GQ, among other publications.