Love & Prohibition

Joanna Gleason is a Tony Award-winning actress best known for her roles on Broadway in I Love My Wife, Joe Egg, Into the Woods, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Her extensive film and television career includes Heartburn, Boogie Nights, Hannah and Her Sisters, Sex and the City, The West Wing, Tracey Ullman, Friends, Blue Bloods, The Affair, Sensitive Skin, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and The Bite. Gleason has received the New England Theatre Conference with a Special Award for Achievement in Theatre, the Rockefeller Award from SUNY Purchase for Artistic Achievement, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Occidental College. She is currently in post production for the feature film The Grotto, which she wrote and directed.

Jamaica Kincaid’s works include the short story collection At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the nonfiction books A Small Place, Talk Stories, and Among Flowers, and the novels Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. Kincaid’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review and The New Yorker, where she worked as a staff writer for twenty years. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and the Dan David Prize in Literature. Kincaid is currently the Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard.

Carson McCullers (1917 - 1967), considered a leading voice in Southern Gothic literature, rose to prominence with the publication of her critically acclaimed first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Subsequently, McCullers wrote three novels, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and Clock Without Hands, and numerous short stories, poems, and plays. Her Broadway adaptation of The Member of the Wedding won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1950, and the 1963 adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Café was nominated for six Tony Awards. McCullers died from complications following a stroke, and the collection The Mortgaged Heart as well as her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, were published posthumously.

James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, 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, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, The Blacklist, The Affair, Equity, Odd Mom Out, The Tap, The Independents, The Romanoffs, The Accidental Wolf, and And Just Like That…

George Saunders is the author of the short story collections and novellas Fox 8, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, Tenth of December, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, and the children’s book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip with illustrator Lane Smith. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the Man Booker Prize. His writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GQ. He is the recipient of the Folio Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award, the National Magazine Award, a World Fantasy Award, and the Story Prize, as well as fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. Saunders teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. His latest work, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a curated collection of classic short stories by Russian authors, with essays by Saunders that explore each story, with the aim of exploring the short story form.

David Sedaris is the author of eleven books, including, most recently, A Carnival of Snackery, The Best of Me, Calypso, and Theft by Finding. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4. In 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Sedaris is the recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, Jonathan Swift International Literature Prize for Satire and Humor, and the Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

Hattie Winston is a stage and screen actress best known for her work on Becker and The Electric Company. Film and television credits include Nurse, Clara’s Heart, A Show of Force, Beverly Hills Cop III, Sunset Park, Homefront, Jackie Brown, Port Charles, True Crime, The Battle of Shaker Heights, Scrubs, ER, Numb3rs, Cold Case, Castle, Mike & Molly, All Grown Up!, and The Soul Man. On stage, Winston appeared in the Public Theatre’s productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona and Mother Courage and Her Children, as well as productions of The Me Nobody Knows and The Tap Dance Kid.

CREDITS

“Girl” from At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983). First appeared in The New Yorker (June 1978). Copyright © 1978 Jamaica Kincaid. Used by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

“Lars Farf, Excessively Fearful Father and Husband” by George Saunders from Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary (Delacorte Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by George Saunders. Used by permission of International Creative Management.

"A Domestic Dilemma" by Carson McCullers. From Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings (Library of America, 2017). Copyright © 1951 by Carson McCullers, copyright © 1971 by Floria V. Lasky, Executrix of the Estate of Carson McCullers. Used by permission of the Estate of Carson McCullers and Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians.