Santino Fontana is known for his Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Tony Award-winning portrayal of Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels in the Broadway production of Tootsie, and for voicing the character Prince Hans in Disney’s Academy Award-winning animated feature Frozen. Additionally, he has starred in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; 1776; and Zorba with Encores!; and on Broadway in The Importance of Being Earnest (Clarence Derwent Award); Brighton Beach Memoirs (Drama Desk Award); Act One; Billy Elliot; Cinderella (Tony nomination); and Hello, Dolly! His onscreen credits include Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Sisters, Shades of Blue, Mozart in the Jungle, Submissions Only, Off the Menu, Impossible Monsters, Fosse/Verdon, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Just One Kiss.

Nikki M. James originated the role of Nabalungi in the Broadway hit musical The Book of Mormon, for which she won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She recently starred in the world premiere of Shaina Taub's Suffs at The Public Theater and received a Drama League nomination. Her favorite theater credits include Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day at The Public, Broadway productions of Les Miserables, All Shook Up, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin with Encores!, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra alongside Christopher Plummer at the Stratford Theater, The Wiz at the La Jolla Playhouse, Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night with Shakespeare in the Park, Bernarda Alba at Lincoln Center, and Preludes with LCT3. Her film and television credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Lucky Stiff, BrainDead, Proven Innocent, The Good Wife, and Modern Love. As a director, she has helmed episodes of The Bite and The Good Fight. She served as an assistant director to Michael Arden for the Broadway revival of Once on This Island and A Christmas Carol starring Jefferson Mays. James can currently be seen in the hit television series Severance on Apple TV+.

Katrina Lenk can currently be seen on the final season of Netflix’s Ozark and recently starred as Bobbie in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. She previously starred as Dina in The Band’s Visit, for which she earned Tony, Grammy, and Lucille Lortel awards. Additional Broadway credits include Pulitzer Prize-winning Indecent, Once, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and The Miracle Worker. Lenk has also been featured on Apple TV+’s Little Voice, Tommy on CBS, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon.

Maulik Pancholy is an actor, author, and activist. He is best known for his television roles on 30 Rock, Weeds, Whitney, The Good Fight, Only Murders in the Building, and for lending his voice to the long-running animated series Phineas & Ferb and Sanjay & Craig. He starred on Broadway in Bess Wohl's Grand Horizons and in Terrence McNally’s It's Only a Play, and recently in 2nd Stage's Off-Broadway production of To My Girls. Pancholy’s debut novel, The Best at It, was named a 2020 Stonewall Honor Book and is being developed for television at HBOMax. His second novel, Nikhil Out Loud, comes out this October. Pancholy is the co-founder of the anti-bullying organization ActToChange.org.

Tara Westover was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. In 2014 she earned a PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. Since its publication in 2018, Educated has spent over 160 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including 14 weeks at #1 and has been translated into over 45 foreign languages. It was a finalist for several awards including the National Book Critic Circle’s Award in Autobiography, the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was the winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir & Autobiography.

Greg Ames is the author of Buffalo Lockjaw, a novel that won a NAIBA Book of the Year Award, and Funeral Platter, a collection of twenty short stories, including several that have been featured on Selected Shorts. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Southern Review, McSweeney’s, The Sun, Catapult, and North American Review, among many others. He teaches in the English department at Colgate University.

Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection Break Any Woman Down and the novel Elsewhere, California, both of which were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, as well as In the Not Quite Dark, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, The Paris Review, Callaloo, and The Iowa Review, among others, and anthologized in On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, and California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. Recent work includes Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Patricia Marx is a New Yorker staff writer, former writer for Saturday Night Live, and author of the novels Him Her Him Again the End of Him and Starting from Happy, both Thurber Prize finalists; as well as the nonfiction work Let’s Be Less Stupid. She and Roz Chast have collaborated on several books, including Now Everybody Really Hates Me, Meet My Staff, and You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples. She was the first woman on the Harvard Lampoon, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Marx can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hand.

Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of ten works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into critically acclaimed movies, and The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher, which were both adapted into HBO series. His most recent novel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, was published in June.