Mending Families

Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. Brinkley was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Brandon J. Dirden starred on Broadway as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Tony Award-winning production of All the Way with Bryan Cranston, and as Booster in the Tony Award-winning revival of August Wilson’s Jitney. Additional Broadway credits include Clybourne Park, Enron, and Prelude to a Kiss. His many off-Broadway appearances include The Piano Lesson, for which he won Obie, Theatre World, and AUDELCO awards. On screen he has appeared in The Good Wife, The Big C, Public Morals, Manifest, The Get Down, The Accidental Wolf,Blue Bloods,The Quad, and four seasons of The Americans. He recently starred in the ABC series For Life and was seen in the miniseries Mrs. America. Dirden is a proud member of Actors Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and Fair Wage on Stage. Currently, he is working on Lessons in Survival, an online theatrical event where theater artists come together to reinvestigate the words of trailblazing artists and activists who survived and created in times of revolution in our country.

Roxane Gay is the author of numerous essay collections and works of fiction, including Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger, as well as the comic series World of Wakanda. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The New York Times, Rumpus, Oxford American, Salon, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Time. She is the founder of Tiny Hardcore Press and founding editor of PANK, and editor of collections including Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and the 2018 edition of TheBest American Short Stories. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University. Recent works include Graceful Burdens, The Banks with artist Ming Doyle, the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness, and as editor of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.

Heather Monley’s fiction has been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Day One, The Normal School, Saltgrass, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her story “Town of Birds” won The Kenyon Review’s Short Fiction Contest in 2013. Monley has a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.F.A. from Columbia University, where she taught a fiction workshop. She has received residencies from The Lighthouse Works and PLAYA.

Maulik Pancholy is an actor, author, and activist. He is best known for his television roles on 30 Rock, Weeds, Whitney, The Good Fight, and for lending his voice to the long-running animated series Phineas & Ferb and Sanjay & Craig. On stage, he starred on Broadway in Terrence McNally’s It's Only a Play, in The New Group’s production of Good for Otto, Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons at the Helen Hayes Theatre, and most recently The George Street Playhouse virtual production of Becky Mode’s Fully Committed. Pancholy’s debut novel, The Best at It, was named a 2020 Stonewall Honor Book, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the American Library Association’s Booklist. Pancholy is the co-founder of the anti-bullying organization ActToChange.org.

Jenna Ushkowitz is best known for her leading role on Glee, as well as film roles in Yellow Fever and most recently, Hello Again, Rocky Horror Show: Livestream Theater, The Right Girl, and 1 Night in San Diego. On stage, she has appeared in Spring Awakening, Waitress, and The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway, and in regional productions of Hair and The Wedding Singer. Ushkowitz is the co-founder of the podcast network At Will Radio. Ushkowitz made her Producing debut with the Broadway revival of Once On This Island, winning her a Tony Award; she was also a producer on the Broadway productions of Be More Chill and The Inheritance. She can be seen in the upcoming film Rosé All Day.