Susie Essman is an actress, author, and stand-up comedian. She began her career as a working comic, catching the eye of Larry David, who cast her in her now iconic role of the strong-willed “Susie Green” in HBO's long-running series Curb Your Enthusiasm. Since becoming a household name on Curb, Susie has branched out into numerous other television projects, including recurring roles on Law & Order: SVU, Those Who Can’t, Bless This Mess, and most recently, the critically acclaimed HBO series Hacks. Essman received a Critic's Choice Award nomination for her recurring role as Ilana Glazer's mother on the hit Comedy Central series Broad City, which Entertainment Weekly cited as “one of the best choice decisions in TV history.”

John Hodgman is a bestselling writer, humorist, and actor who first honed his comedic voice in the pages of McSweeney’s and as the host of some of their earliest events. His books include Vacationland, Medallion Status, and The Areas of My Expertise, and other work has appeared in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine, where he writes the weekly “Judge John Hodgman” column for The Ethicist. He is also the host of the Judge John Hodgman podcast. He is the co-creator and co-star of the animated comedy Dicktown on Hulu, and recently starred as Tom, The Weird Dad on Up Here, also on Hulu, and Guy Wearing Dockers at the Concert Who Is Not a Narc on Poker Face for Peacock. Hodgman voices the characters of Mouse on Frog and Toad, Snoopy on The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart, and Gary on Archer.

Maria Konnikova is the author, most recently, of The Biggest Bluff, a New York Times bestseller, one of the Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2020, and a finalist for the Telegraph Best Sports Writing Awards for 2021. She is the co-host, along with Nate Silver, of Risky Business, a weekly podcast from Pushkin and iHeartRadio, and the author of The Leap, a new weekly Substack. Her previous books are the bestsellers The Confidence Game, winner of the 2016 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, an Anthony and Agatha Award finalist. Her regular contributions to The New Yorker have won numerous awards, including the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. While researching The Biggest Bluff, Maria became an international poker champion and winner of over half a million in tournament earnings. She is currently a member of PokerStars Team Pro. Her writing has been featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She formerly hosted the podcast The Grift from Panoply Media, a show that explored con artists and the lives they ruin. Her podcasting work earned her a National Magazine Award nomination in 2019. Konnikova graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in psychology from Columbia University. She is currently at work on a book about cheating in games.

Dylan Marron made the podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me. He wrote a book of the same name, published in 2022 from Atria. He wrote for Ted Lasso. Most recently, Marron made a 6-part audio documentary called The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks.

Colby Minifie recently starred on the television series The Boys, Fear the Walking Dead, and Gen V. She has appeared on Broadway in The Pillowman, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and Six Degrees Of Separation; Off-Broadway in Epiphany, Punk Rock, Close Up Space, Landscape of the Body, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Her film and television credits include Law & Order, Glee, Nurse Jackie, The Blacklist, The Michael J. Fox Show, Black Box, Deep Powder, Camilla Dickinson, The Greatest, The Winning Season, Don’t Think Twice, Paterno, Submission, The Super, An Actor Prepares, Radium Girls, Madam Secretary, Dietland, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and Homebody. She can currently be seen on the series Gen V. Minifie is thrilled to continue to work with Selected Shorts.

James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, he directed the Tony-nominated productions of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Paul Newman. He also directed the television production of Our Town for Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including The Devil Wears Prada, Damages, The Paper Chase, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, Turks & Caicos, The Affair, The Tap, The Independents, The Romanoffs, The Accidental Wolf, And Just Like That…, Not the Same Clarence, Three Women, and SilverSizzle.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, among other books. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel. Wolitzer hosts the radio show and podcast of Selected Shorts.

Maeve Dunigan is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and her work has been featured in McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Reductress. Additionally, she’s a staff writer at Vox Media, where she covers pets and wildlife for The Dodo. She is half of the musical sketch duo Pigeon, and she regularly produces and co-hosts Pigeon Presents, a comedy variety show that has been featured in TimeOut New York. She also co-hosts Some Fun Lines, a monthly open mic and quarterly show dedicated to prose humor. Dunigan’s debut satire and essay collection, Read This To Look Cool, is slated for publication summer of 2025 from Sourcebooks.

Susan Perabo is the author of the short story collections Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do and the novels The Broken Places and The Fall of Lisa Bellow. Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. She is Writer in Residence and Professor of Creative Writing at Dickinson College and on the faculty at Queens University.

Simon Rich is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He has written for Saturday Night Live, Pixar, and The Simpsons and is the creator of the TV shows Man Seeking Woman and Miracle Workers, which he based on his books. His other collections include Ant Farm, Spoiled Brats, New Teeth, and Hits and Misses, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Rich’s latest collection, Glory Days, will be published in July.

John Updike (1932 – 2009) is the author of over sixty books, spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is the recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the 1998 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Beginning in 1954, he contributed hundreds of essays, stories, and poems to The New Yorker. He is best known for the series of novels that includes Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Is Rich (Pulitzer Prize 1981); Rabbit at Rest (Pulitzer Prize 1990); and Rabbit Redux; and the story collections Too Far to Go (The Maples Stories), Trust Me, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, and posthumously, The Stories of John Updike.