Thomas Beller is the author of the essay collection Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball, the fiction collections Seduction Theory, The Sleep-Over Artist, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, and the biography J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, winner of the New York City Book Award for Biography/Memoir. He co-founded the Open City magazine and co-edited the publication for twenty years. Beller’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Ploughshares, The Southwest Review, Guernica, Salon, among other publications, and he regularly contributes to The New Yorker. Beller is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University.
Augusten Burroughs is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Running with Scissors, Dry, A Wolf at the Table, Lust & Wonder, and Toil & Trouble, the essay collections Magical Thinking and Possible Side Effects, the novel Sellevision, and the short story collection You Better Not Cry. Running with Scissors was adapted into a film in 2006. His children’s book, My Little Thief, was published in 2023.
Michael Cerveris is the two-time Tony Award and Grammy Award–winning Broadway star of Fun Home and Assassins. Additional Broadway credits include Tammy Faye, Sweeney Todd, The Who's Tommy, Evita, Titanic, LoveMusik, Cymbeline, Hedda Gabler, Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), and many others. Off-Broadway, he has appeared in The Who’s Tommy, King Lear, Road Show, Nine Lives, and Nassim and many more. His film and television credits include Fringe, Treme, Madam Secretary, The Good Wife, The Mexican, Cirque Du Freak, The Tick, Gotham, Mosaic, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Elementary, Evil, and The Plot Against America. He can currently be seen in The Gilded Age. Cerveris also works as a musician, both solo and with his band, Loose Cattle.
Jane Curtin has appeared on Broadway in Noises Off, Candida, and Our Town. Her off-Broadway work includes Love Letters and the musical revue Pretzels, which she co-wrote. She starred in the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun and won back-to-back Emmy Awards for her role on Kate & Allie. She is an original cast member of Saturday Night Live and also starred in the television film series The Librarian and its spin-off, The Librarians. Her film credits include Coneheads; Antz; I Love You, Man; I Don’t Know How She Does It; The Heat; The Spy Who Dumped Me; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; Ode to Joy; Godmothered; Queen Bees; and Jules, opposite Sir Ben Kingsley. She starred on the television series Unforgettable and has had guest appearances on The Good Wife, 48 Hours ’til Monday, The Good Fight, Broad City, United We Fall, and Bupkis. Upcoming projects include the mini-series The Resident.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.
CREDITS
“And Two Eyes Made Out of Coal” by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2009 by Island Road LLC, originally published in You Better Not Cry by St. Martin’s Press. Used by permission of Augusten Burroughs c/o Selectric Artists LLC.
“Live Wires” by Thomas Beller, from The New Yorker (December 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Thomas Beller. Used by permission of the author.
