Extended Families

Richard Bausch is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels Rebel Powers; Violence; In The Night Season; Hello to the Cannibals; Peace; Before, During, After; and the story collections Rare & Endangered Species; Someone to Watch Over Me; Wives & Lovers; Something Is Out There; and Living in the Weather of the World. His stories have been widely anthologized, appearing in the Granta Book of the American Short Story and the Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is also the editor of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Bausch’s most recent work, Playhouse, was published in 2023. He is currently a writing professor at Chapman University in California.

James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. 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…, and Not the Same Clarence, for which he was awarded Best Actor at the Chain NYC Film Festival and the Bridgeport Film Festival.

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City–based artist working in theater, opera, and film. Schaal's work has shown in divergent contexts from NYC basements, to courtyards in Vietnam, to East African amphitheaters, to European opera houses, to US public housing, to rural auditoriums in the UAE. Domestically, her work has shown at BAM, LA Philharmonic, The Shed, The Kennedy Center, Walker Arts Center, MCA Chicago, REDCAT, The New Victory Theater, NYLA, PS122, New Orleans Center for Contemporary Art, CAC Cincinnati, PICA, and On the Boards. Schaal has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, and Creative Capital Award. She is currently developing the works Split Tooth and Hush Arbor, which will be shown at the Luminato Festival in Canada and The Momentary in Arizona.

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time; as well as the novella The Embassy of Cambodia and three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, and Intimations. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People and the author of the children’s books, The Surprise; and Weirdo of which she co-wrote with her husband Nick Laird. Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. In 2023, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her latest novel, The Fraud, was published in September 2023.

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.

CREDITS

“What Feels Like the World” by Richard Bausch. Copyright © by Richard Bausch. Used by permission of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

“Grand Union” from Grand Union by Zadie Smith. Published by Penguin. Copyright © Zadie Smith. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.