Joanna Gleason won a Tony for her portrayal of the Baker’s Wife in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods. Her other Broadway and off-Broadway credits include The Normal Heart; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, for which she received a Tony nomination; I Love My Wife; Happiness; Joe Egg, for which she received a Tony nomination; Sons of the Prophet; and The Real Thing; to name only a few. Her television credits include The West Wing, The Newsroom, Love and War, Bette, and many more. Films include Hannah and Her Sisters, Boogie Nights, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Skeleton Twins, and many more. She has written and directed two films: a short, Morning Into Night, which debuted at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival and was selected for the Cambridge Film Festival; and a feature, The Grotto, which won the Best Narrative Feature premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival in 2022. She has been reading stories for Selected Shorts for 35 years.
Uche Okonkwo’s “Long Hair” is from her debut collection of short stories, A Kind of Madness, to be published by Tin House in April 2024. Her stories have appeared in A Public Space, One Story, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Zyzzyva, and Lagos Noir, among others. A former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and resident at Art Omi, she is a recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and a Steinbeck Fellowship. Okonkwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and is currently pursuing a creative writing PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who by Fire and Skinny. Her essays and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including TheNew York Times, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Esquire, the Guardian, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Glimmer Train Stories, Playboy, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Washington Post, GQ, Southern Review, and Harper's. She has received awards from Yaddo, A Room of Her Own Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Ucross Foundation, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly newsletter, Dispatches from the Road.
Karen Pittman is a Critics Choice award nominee and SAG Award nominee, and is best known for starring roles on The Morning Show, And Just Like That…, The Americans, and Yellowstone. Her numerous stage credits include the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Disgraced, for which she received the 2015 Theatre World Award, and Pipeline, for which she was nominated for Lucille Lortel and Broadway League’s Distinguished Performance awards. Pittman recently starred in the films What We Do Next and Unthinkably Good Things, and the series The Long Long Night.
Simon Van Booy has written more than a dozen works of fiction, including Night Came with Many Stars and The Presence of Absence, and is the editor of three volumes of philosophy. Raised in rural North Wales, Simon currently lives between London and New York, where he is a volunteer EMT for Central Park Medical Unit and RVAC. His latest novel, Sipsworth, was published in May.
Kirsten Vangsness is most known for playing the bespectacled tech kitten Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds, which is currently filming its 17th season for Paramount+. She is also a playwright and theatermaker who was most recently seen in Exorcistic:The Rock Musical at the San Francisco Sketchfest. Vangsness hosts a monthly performance salon at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, where she is a company member. She LOVES reading for Selected Shorts.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer 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
“Reality” by Diana Spechler, winner of the 2021 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Copyright © 2021 by Diana Spechler. Used by permission of the author.
“Long Hair,” copyright © 2016 by Uche Okonkwo. Originally published in Per Contra; reprinted in A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo (Tin House Books, 2024). Permission granted by the author.
“A Sacrifice,” by Simon Van Booy, from The Sadness of Beautiful Things (Penguin Books, 2018). First appeared in The Irish Times (December 23, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Simon Van Booy. Used by permission of the author.
