ACTORS & ARTISTS
Donna Lynne Champlin is best known for her role as Paula on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Additional film and television credits include Law & Order; Submissions Only; The Good Wife; Birdman; Younger; Downsizing; Another Period; Yes, God, Yes; and Feel the Beat. Champlin has appeared on Broadway in James Joyce’s The Dead, By Jeeves, Hollywood Arms, Sweeney Todd, and Billy Elliot: The Musical, and off-Broadway in My Life with Albertine, First Lady Suite, Flight of the Lawnchair Man, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, for which she won an Obie Award, As You Like It, Working, for which she won a Drama Desk Award, and The Taming of the Shrew. She also regularly performs her one-woman show, Finishing the Hat.
Julia Elliott’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, The New York Times, and other publications. She was honored with a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and The Best American Short Stories. Her debut story collection, The Wilds, chosen by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Book Riot, and Electric Literature as one of the Best Books of 2014, and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her debut novel, The New and Improved Ronnie Futch, was published in 2015.
Tayari Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage, a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection and winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, as well as Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo. She has been awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the NAACP Image Award, among other honors. Jones serves as Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. In 2019, she was appointed an A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University.
Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977) was one of Brazil’s foremost modern writers, earning international acclaim for her novels and short stories. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was awarded the 1944 Graça Aranha national prize for fiction, and her following works, including the short story collection Family Ties and the novels The Passion According to G.H. and Água Viva, were similarly lauded. Interest in Lispector’s work was revived in 2009 with the publication of Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. The translated collection The Complete Stories was published by New Directions and won the PEN Translation Prize in 2016.
Pepe Nufrio most recently appeared in the 50th Anniversary national tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. He is a graduate of The New School and has studied at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Past credits include Broadway Rising Stars and Broadway Unplugged at Town Hall; The Great Broadway Belt Show; Great Singers, Great Songs at Feinstein’s/54 Below; and regional productions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, Evita, Grease, and Into the Woods, among others.
