Past and Future

ACTORS & ARTISTS

Bruce Altman’s numerous film and television credits include Glengarry Glen Ross, Matchstick Men, Arbitrage, Touched with Fire, the Peabody Award-winning Nothing Sacred, The Sopranos, Blue Bloods, Modern Family, Mr. Robot, Madoff, Fifty Shades Darker, Ozark, Chicago P.D., Fifty Shades Freed, Orange Is the New Black, The Sound of Silence, NOS4A2, City on a Hill, and HBO’s Emmy Award-winning films Recount and Game Change. His extensive theater career includes productions at Yale Rep, Long Wharf, the American Conservatory Theater, and the Theater for the New City. Altman will appear in the forthcoming films Chemical Hearts and Kingfish.

Melora Hardin can currently be seen on the hit Freeform series The Bold Type, and on Amazon’s Transparent in her Emmy-nominated role as Tammy Cashman. She is recognized worldwide as Jan Levinson from NBC’s The Office. She recently starred in the first one-woman movie ever, Golden Vanity, and can be seen in the forthcoming film The S.H.U. Her extensive big-screen credits include 17 Again, Hannah Montana: The Movie, 27 Dresses, The Hot Chick, Absolute Power, Cruel Hearts, and You, which she also directed. Hardin has been a professional actor since she was 6 years old and has guest starred on TV favorites such as Little House on the Prairie, The Love Boat, Friends, Gilmore Girls, Monk, The Blacklist, Falling Skies, Scandal, and A Million Little Things.

Naguib Mahfouz (1911 - 2006) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He is best known for his Cairo Trilogy, as well as The Children of Gebelawi, The Thief and the Dogs, and Adrift on the Nile. In 1989, Mahfouz was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor from the American University in Cairo, and he was elected to both the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sonia Manzano is known to millions as Maria on Sesame Street, a character she played from 1971 to 2015, and has earned fifteen Emmy Awards as a writer for the show. Her theater credits include The Exonerated; Love, Loss, and What I Wore; and the original production of Godspell. She is the author of the picture books No Dogs Allowed!; A Box Full of Kittens; and Miracle on 133rd Street, as well as the middle-grade novel The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano and her memoir, Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx. In 2016, Manzano received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 43rd Annual Daytime Emmy Awards.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including Them, winner of the National Book Award; Black Water; We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; The Accursed; The Pursuit; and most recently, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. Oates was recently honored with the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

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. He starred on Broadway in Terrence McNally’s It's Only a Play and in The New Group’s production of Good for Otto. He recently returned to Broadway in Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons at the Helen Hayes Theatre. Pancholy’s debut novel, The Best at It, was named a Stonewall Honor Book and received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and American Library Association’s Booklist. Pancholy is the co-founder of the anti-bullying organization ActToChange.org.

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, which was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO series starring Frances McDormand, as well as The Burgess Boys, a New York Times bestseller, Abide with Me, a national bestseller and BookSense pick, Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other periodicals. Strout’s most recent novel, Olive, Again, was published in 2019.