Stockard Channing is known for her roles across film, television, and theater, appearing in Grease, The West Wing, for which she earned an Emmy Award, and Six Degrees of Separation, first on Broadway and then in its film adaptation, earning her Tony, Golden Globe, and Academy Award nominations. Channing has appeared on Broadway in The Little Foxes, The Lion in Winter, Pal Joey, Other Desert Cities, and It’s Only a Play. Additional screen credits include Practical Magic, The Mysteries of Laura, The Good Wife, Difficult People, The Guest Book, The Matthew Shepard Story, for which she won an Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, Angry Neighbors, and Maryland.
Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award for fiction, and Chimerica: A Novel. She is the editor of Alta Journal's California Book Club and served as Fiction Committee Chair for the National Book Critics Circle for 2022. Her short stories have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Alta, Air/Light, Midnight Breakfast, The Normal School, and Joyland. A finalist for an Los Angeles Press Club National Arts and Entertainment awards, she has contributed essays and reviews to the Washington Post, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times (Modern Love), the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including the novel The Need, which was a nominee for the 2019 National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic and the New York Times. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Her novel Hum is forthcoming from Marysue Rucci Books.
Kirsten Vangsness is best known for her role as Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds, which is now in season 16, streaming on Paramount+. Her recent performances include starring in the world premiere of the new Phinny Kiyomura play Nimrod at Theatre of NOTE and Justin Elizabeth Sayers’ Lottie Pratchett Took a Hatchet at San Francisco Sketch Fest. In 2019, two of her plays, Mess and Cleo, Theo and Wu, were performed at Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to critical acclaim. In her spare time, Vangsness buses tables at the Blinking Owl Distillery.
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
“The Knowers” from SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS by Helen Phillips. Copyright © 2016 by Helen Phillips. Used by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All Rights Reserved.
“Time Invents Us” by Anita Felicelli. Originally appeared in Alta (Fall 2020/Issue 13). Copyright © 2020 by Anita Felicelli. Used by permission of the author.
