Pascale Armand starred on Broadway in Eclipsed, for which she received a Tony nomination, and The Trip to Bountiful with the late Ms. Cicely Tyson. Additional stage credits include Love's Labor's Lost, Hamlet, A Raisin in the Sun, The Piano Lesson, Jitney, Gem of the Ocean, Ruined, The Convert, for which she received the 2012 Los Angeles Ovation Award for Best Leading Actress, Belleville, An Octoroon, and Relevance. Her screen credits include Chicago Med, Prodigal Son, The Blacklist, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Armand is an alumna of NYU's Graduate Acting Program, core member of Quick Silver Theater, and creator of her one-woman show, $#!thole Country Clapback.

Carrie Coon currently stars on HBO’s The Gilded Age. She is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has performed in Mary Page Marlowe, Three Sisters, The March, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which also ran on Broadway, earning Coon a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress and a Theatre World Award. Her film and television credits include Gone Girl, The Post, Widows, Avengers: Infinity War, The Nest, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Sinner, The Leftovers (Critics’ Choice Television Award), and Fargo. Coon received the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama for her performances in The Leftovers and Fargo.

Mona Eltahawy is the founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter Feminist Giant. Her first book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa, and her second, The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls, took her disruption worldwide. Eltahawy’s commentary has appeared in media around the world.

Ann Harada is best known for playing Christmas Eve in the Broadway and London productions of Avenue Q and stepsister Charlotte in Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Additional Broadway credits include 9 to 5, the revival of Les Misérbales, Seussical, and M. Butterfly. Film and television credits include Sisters, Admission, Hope Springs, The Art of Getting By, Feel, The Jim Gaffigan Show, Happiness, Smash, Lipstick Jungle, 30 Rock, Blue Bloods, The Flight Attendant, and Schmigadoon!. Upcoming films include Disenchanted and Jerry and Marge Go Large.

Pooya Mohseni is a New York-based actor, writer, and transgender activist, born and raised in Tehran, Iran. She has appeared in Hamlet and Comedy of Errors at the Play On Shakespeare Festival, One Woman with United Solo, Galatea with the WP Project, The Good Muslim at EST, White Snake at Baltimore Center Stage, Death of the Persian Prince with the Midtown International Theatre Festival and the SAIPAF, and A Touch of Forever with the New York International Fringe Festival. Her film and television credits include Law & Order: SVU, Big Dogs, Falling Water, Madam Secretary, Lucky, Terrifier and See You Then, making its theatrical debut this year. She recently appeared in the world premiere of English with Atlantic Theater Company.

Lois Smith is an actress whose film career began with East of Eden and includes Fried Green Tomatoes, Dead Man Walking, Twister, Minority Report, Lady Bird, Uncle Frank, The French Dispatch, and The Gettysburg Address. Recent television credits include Grace and Frankie, Younger, Sneaky Pete, The Son, On Becoming a God in Central Florida, and Ray Donovan. Smith is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. She was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame, and in 2013, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Obie Award for excellence in Off-Broadway Performances. Additionally, Smith has been honored with Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Circle awards and the 2021 Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Inheritance.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam, and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, Atwood was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor for services to literature.

Anya DeNiro is a trans woman and fiction writer living in Minnesota. Her most recent book is City of a Thousand Feelings from Aqueduct Press. “Take Pills and Wait for Hips” is an excerpt from her most recent manuscript, OKPsyche. Her work has been shortlisted for the O. Henry Award and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. In the early 1890s, she began publishing poems and stories, including “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and became a lecturer on labor, feminism, reform, and suffrage. In 1898, she published Women and Economics, a call for financial independence for women. From 1909 to 1916 she wrote, edited, and published the monthly magazine The Forerunner, in which she published most of her work from then on, including What Diantha Did, The Man-Made World, Moving the Mountain, and both Herland and With Her in Ourland. With Jane Addams she founded the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915.

Joanne Harris is the internationally renowned and award-winning author of eighteen novels, plus novellas, scripts, short stories, libretti, lyrics, and articles, including a self-help book for writers, Ten Things About Writing. In 2000, her 1999 novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and is Chair of the Society of Authors. Her latest novel is the thriller A Narrow Door.

Shanteka Sigers is a graduate of Northwestern University and New York University’s MFA Writers Workshop in Paris. She has published several stories in the Chicago Reader’s Pure Fiction issue. Her story “A Way with Bea” has appeared in the Paris Review and the 2021 Best American Short Stories. She was listed by Business Insider as one of the Top Creative Women in Advertising and twice named among Black Enterprise’s Top Women in Marketing and Advertising. Currently, she works at Meta as a Director for Creative Shop.