Pride Inside

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. In 2018, they were a Lambda Literary Review Writer-in-Residence for Poetry, a guest faculty member at the Poetry Foundation, and were included in the “9 Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Writers You Should Know” in Vogue magazine. Barrett has received fellowships from VONA, Macondo, and The Home School. On stage, they have been featured at Lincoln Center, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Chicago Historical Society, and the Brooklyn Museum. Their work has been featured on Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Poetry, Asian American Literary Review, NYLON, Buzzfeed, WBAI Radio, and NPR, among others. Barrett is the author of the poetry collections When the Chant Comes and More Than Organs. They received the 2021 ALA Barbara Gittings Stonewall Honor Book Award.

Michelle Beck is an actor, filmmaker, and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, New York. As an actress, she has had recurring roles on Starz’s Power Book II: Ghost and Marvel’s Luke Cage, as well as appearances in The Good Fight, Fleischman Is in Trouble, Manifest, Homeland, Claws, Madam Secretary, Ovum, Ambition’s Debt, Death of a Prince, and Spinning Into Butter. She has worked on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun, and her extensive New York and regional theater credits include Hurricane Diane with the New York Theater Workshop, Richard III and Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Public Theater, A Kid Like Jake with LCT3, Richard and Jane and Dick and Sally with Playwright’s Realm and Baltimore Center Stage, As You Like It and The Tempest at BAM and the Old Vic, Much Ado About Nothing with Theater for a New Audience, Measure for Measure with Epic Theatre Ensemble, and The Changeling with Red Bull. As a filmmaker, her short film, The Snakes, is currently screening on HBO and HBO Max. As a teaching artist, Beck is the Director of Film at Epic Theater Ensemble, where students from Title 1 schools generate original theater and film pieces focused on social justice issues.

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, and BROS. Their solo shows, They, Themself and Schmerm and Schmermie's Choice, have toured across the US. Blackwell is the creator and star of the short film As Schmerm as It Gets, and was a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, the Franklin Furnace Award, and the Creative Capital Award. They made their Broadway debut in Is This a Room and can be seen in the forthcoming film You Can’t Stay Here.

Ivan E. Coyote is the author of thirteen fiction and nonfiction works, including Boys Like Her, Close to Spider Man, Bow Grip, winner of the ReLit Award for Best Fiction and the Stonewall Book Award Honor, One in Every Crowd, Gender Failure, Tomboy Survival Guide, also a Stonewall Book Award Honor winner, and Rebent Sinner. Coyote is a filmmaker, musician, stage performer, columnist for Xtra! and Xtra! West, and contributor to The Georgia Straight and CBC Radio. They were the 2018-2019 Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University. Coyote’s latest work, Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures, was published in 2021.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours, which was adapted into an award-winning film, as well as an opera, which premiered at The Met in 2022. His works also include the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen, and the short-story collection A Wild Swan, as well as the nonfiction Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. Cunningham has received the Whiting Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Professor in the Practice at Yale University. His latest novel, Day, is forthcoming from Random House in 2024.

Mike Doyle has appeared on screen in New Amsterdam, City on a Hill, The Romanoffs, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Accidental Wolf, Narcos: Mexico, Jersey Boys, The Invitation, and Green Lantern, among others. His stage credits include The New Century at Lincoln Center and Betrayed with the Culture Project. Doyle wrote and directed the feature film Almost Love starring Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, and Scott Evans, and recently completed the full-length feature Passing Through. Upcoming acting projects include the films Amy Makes Three, The Kill Room, and The Greatest.

[from W2W] Larry Keigwin has danced his way from the Metropolitan Opera to downtown clubs to Broadway and back. He founded KEIGWIN + COMPANY in 2003, and the company has performed at The Kennedy Center, The Joyce Theater, and New York City Center, among many others. Commissions include Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance, Royal New Zealand Ballet, The Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Juilliard School. His work in musical theater includes Tales of the City, the off-Broadway production of Rent, for which he received the 2011 Joe A. Callaway Award, and If/Then on Broadway. Keigwin is the Director of Dance and a co-founder of the Green Box Arts Festival in Green Mountain Falls, CO, as well as the Dance Editor of ArtDesk.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut collection of short stories, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award, and a winner of The Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Philyaw is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. In 2021, it was announced that The Secret Lives of Church Ladies would be adapted for television by HBO Max, with Philyaw as an executive producer alongside Tessa Thompson.

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

“No Bikini” by Ivan E. Coyote, from Close to Spider Man (Arsenal Pump Press, 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Ivan E. Coyote. Used by permission of Arsenal Pulp Press.

“Sleepless” 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.

“Snowfall” by Deesha Philyaw, from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press, 2020). First appeared in The Baltimore Review (Winter 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Deesha Philyaw. Used by permission of Upstart Crow Literary.

“Song for the Kicked Out” by Kay Ulanday Barrett. First appeared online on kaybarrett.net (2012). Copyright © 2012 by Kay Ulanday Barrett. Used by permission of the author.