Jennifer Ikeda’s stage appearances, both on and off-Broadway, include Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, As You Like It with the Public Theater, Vietgone, Top Girls, Linda, with MTC, King Philip’s Head… with Clubbed Thumb, Fefu and Her Friends, tiny father, and most recently, a staged reading of Support Person with the New Dramatists as part of PlayTime Fall 2024. She has also been featured in the television shows Blue Bloods, New Amsterdam, Maniac, Tell Me a Story, Dash & Lily, and the films Advantageous and Swing, among others. Ikeda has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including the A Court of Thorns and Roses series, and has been honored with two Audie Awards. Ikeda can be seen in the upcoming short film Ode to Psyche.
Julie Otsuka is the author of When the Emperor Was Divine, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, and the 2022 Children’s Literary Association’s Phoenix Award; and The Buddha in the Attic, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and France’s Prix Femina Etranger and a finalist for the National Book Award. The Buddha in the Attic was also selected as a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe Best Book of the Year, and was named in the top ten books of the year in both Library Journal and Vogue. Her fiction has been published in Granta, Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012. Her most recent novel,The Swimmers, was published in 2022 and won the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Hettienne Park is best known for her roles as Beverly Katz on Hannibal and Tamika Collins on Stephen King's The Outsider. Additional screen credits include The Girls on the Bus, Don’t Look Up, Gossip Girl, The OA, Blacklist, High Maintenance, Bride Wars, Damages, and more. Park appeared on Broadway in Seminar with Alan Rickman and off-Broadway in Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, earning her a Theatre World Award for her debuts both on and off-Broadway. Park can be seen in the upcoming film Sorry, Baby, a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Amy Silverberg is a writer and comedian based in Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature from USC, where she currently teaches. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, the Paris Review, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. As a stand-up comedian, she has appeared on Comedy Central, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. Her debut novel, First Time, Long Time, is forthcoming from Grand Central Press in July 2025.
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
“Somebody’s Daughter,” by Amy Silverberg. Commissioned by Symphony Space. Copyright © 2023 by Amy Silverberg and Symphony Space.
"Evacuation Order No. 19" from When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, copyright © 2002 by Julie Otsuka, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
