Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, Willful Creatures, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Color Master, and most recently, The Butterfly Lampshade, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and the Paris Review, among other publications, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages.
Patricia Kalember’s stage credits include The White Card, The Nerd, Losing Louie, Y2k, Don’t Dress for Dinner, Sea of Tranquility, Loose Knit, and From Above. She played the role of Gloria Steinem in Gloria: A Life in New York and Boston. She received an Outer Critics Circle nomination for her role in the original cast of The Foreigner. On television, she's had recurring roles on The Tick, Power, thirtysomething, and starred in Sisters. Other television credits include Law & Order: SVU, Power, Orange Is the New Black, Gossip Girl, Blue Bloods, Allegiance, Madam Secretary, Veep, The Good Wife, and the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge. Her numerous films include Jacob’s Ladder, Path to War, A Far Off Place, Signs, Rabbit Hole, The Company Men, Limitless, Girl Most Likely, and Run All Night. She can currently be seen on Power Book IV: Force.
Louise Erdrich is the author of a memoir, three books of poetry, and more than a dozen works of fiction, including the short story collection The Red Convertible and the award-winning novels Love Medicine, The Plague of Doves, The Round House, which won the National Book Award in 2012, LaRose, Future Home of the Living God, The Night Watchman, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021, and The Sentence. Her most recent novel, The Mighty Red, was published in 2024.
Alysia Reiner is best known for her role as Fig on seven seasons of Orange Is the New Black, for which she received a SAG Award, and for originating Agent Sadie Deever in the 2023 Emmy and Critics Choice Award–winning Ms. Marvel. Additional recent television credits includes five seasons as Sunny on the Peabody Award–winning Better Things on FX and HULU, two seasons as Kiki on HBO’s The Deuce, two seasons as Kathryn in Sharon Horgan’s Shining Vale on HBO, and Season Two of Netflix’s The Diplomat, which is streaming now. Recent film credits include The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, and additional highlights include the Oscar-winning film Sideways, Broad City, and going head-to-head with Viola Davis in How to Get Away with Murder. Alysia has performed on stages from The Royal Court Theatre in London to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem NYC, to the Edinburgh Festival, where she won a Critics Choice Award. Select New York theater credits include An Oak Tree with Tim Crouch, which received a special Obie Award, My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre at The Public, Jesus in Manhattan with the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Pentecost with the Barrow Group.
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
“Un-Selfie” was commissioned by Symphony Space for the collection Small Odysseys: Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Stories, edited by Hannah Tinti, published by Algonquin Books. © 2022 by Symphony Space.
“Best Western” by Louise Erdrich, from The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories (Harper, 2009). Originally appeared in Vogue (May 1990). Copyright © 1990 by Louise Erdrich. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.
