Becca Blackwell has collaborated with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Erin Markey, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf, Lisa D'Amour, and more. Film and television credits include High Maintenance, Ramy, Marriage Story, Shameless, Deadman's Barstool, Jack in the Box, If Found, Sort Of, She’s Clean, You Can’t Stay Here, BROS, and Survival of the Thickest. Their solo shows, They, Themself and Schmerm and Schmermie's Choice, have toured across the US. Blackwell was a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, the Franklin Furnace Award, and the Creative Capital Award. They recently made their Broadway debut in Is This a Room and have a new one-person show, Back to She.
Patrick Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, published by McSweeney’s. He is the winner of a Whiting Award in Fiction and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. Most recently, he guest-edited a queer-fiction issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly. Dacey is the recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize and Pen America Grant and has recently completed a second novel and collection of short stories. He teaches at University of Denver.
Mia Dillon is a Tony-nominated stage actress whose Broadway credits include Our Town, The Miser, The Corn Is Green, Hay Fever, Agnes of God, Crimes of the Heart, and Da. She has worked extensively off-Broadway and regionally from San Diego to Dublin, and her work has been honored with the CT Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk nomination, the Clarence Derwent Award, a Dramalogue Award, among others. Film and TV appearances include all three Law & Orders; Brain Dead; The Jury; Mary and Rhoda; Gods and Generals; The Money Pit; Ordinary World; All Good Things; Never Rarely Sometimes; and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Vanessa Kai was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as Ruby in the world premiere of KPOP. Additional off-Broadway productions include The Pain of My Belligerence at Playwrights Horizons, Henry VI with the National Asian American Theatre Company, Somebody’s Daughter at Second Stage, and The Architecture Of Becoming with the Women’s Project Theater. Kai has been featured on New Amsterdam, Orange Is The New Black, Gotham, The Mysteries of Laura, and as a series regular on the CW’s Kung Fu.
Lisa Ko’s first novel, The Leavers, was a national bestseller that won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for both the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, and her essays and non-fiction in TheNew York Times, TheBeliever, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel, Memory Piece, was released in March.
Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Olive, Again, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Burgess Boys, named one of the best books of 2013 by the Washington Post and NPR; Abide with Me, a national bestseller; Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; and most recently, Oh William!, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Strout was inducted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2022. Her forthcoming novel, Tell Me Everything, will be released in August.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer 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
“Nightlife,” “The Hole,” and “Home” were 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.
