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.
Lauren Groff is the author of seven books, including Fates and Furies and Florida, both of which were finalists for the National Book Award; the novel Matrix, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal; and her latest, The Vaster Wilds, which was published in 2023. She is a winner of the Story Prize, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2017, was named one of the Best of Young American Novelists by the literary magazine Granta. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Groff opened a bookstore, The Lynx, in Gainesville, Florida, in 2024.
Grace Paley (1922 – 2007) is the daughter of Ukrainian/Russian Jewish immigrants, growing up in The Bronx. Works include The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Later the Same Day, Collected Stories, and Just As I Thought. She taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University, City College of New York, and Syracuse University, and was a founder of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, the 1989 Edith Wharton Award, the 1994 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts, the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1992, and the Vermont Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1993. In 1989, Governor Mario Cuomo declared her the first official New York State Writer. She was Vermont's Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2007. Her poetry includes Long Walks and Intimate Talks, Leaning Forward, New and Collected Poems, Begin Again, Fidelity, published posthumously in 2008, and A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry, published in 2017. She has been called a combative pacifist. Her literary life and personal responsibilities were inseparable from her political life and human responsibilities.
Adina Verson is perhaps best known for their role as Poppy White on the hit series Only Murders in the Building on Hulu, and most recently appeared on screen in And Just Like That…on HBO Max. Verson was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for their role in The Lucky Ones, following their Broadway debut in the Tony Award–winning play Indecent. Additional theater credits include productions at Center Theatre Group, Playwrights Horizons, Atlantic Theatre Company, MCC, The Vineyard, Theater for a New Audience, Yale Rep, Seattle Rep, the Guthrie, and Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Verson’s additional screen credits include The Strain, Mozart in the Jungle, Wormwood, The Kitchen, New Amsterdam, and the Sundance selected short film Troy. Verson can currently be seen in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Liberation.
Rita Wolf has been featured in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance with the Transport Group and Out of Time at The Public Theater, both co-productions with The National Asian American Theatre Company; and The Michaels and What Happened? The Michaels Abroad, written and directed by Richard Nelson, at The Public Theater and Hunter College. Additional theater credits include An Ordinary Muslim at New York Theatre Workshop, The American Pilot at Manhattan Theatre Club, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and the premiere of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at New York Theatre Workshop and BAM. Last spring, Wolf was a Beinecke Fellow at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University while appearing in Caryl Churchill's play Escaped Alone.
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.
CREDITS
The works of Grace Paley are under copyright, and they are featured here with the permission of Union Literary and Nora Paley.
“Wants” © 1974 by Grace Paley. Reprinted in The Collected Stories (1994) by Grace Paley.
“Ruthy and Edie” © 1985 by Grace Paley. Reprinted in A Grace Paley Reader (2017), edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley.
“Goodbye and Good Luck” © 1956 by Grace Paley. Reprinted in A Grace Paley Reader (2017), edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley.
