Rites & Rituals

Dana Ivey is a five-time Tony Award nominee who has appeared on Broadway in numerous productions, including The Importance of Being Earnest, Butley, The Rivals, Henry IV, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Sunday in the Park with George, and Heartbreak House. She also earned Drama Desk Awards for her roles in The Last Night of Ballyhoo and Sex and Longing. Her television credits include a starring role in Easy Street and appearances on Law & Order, Frasier, Oz, Sex and the City, Monk, Ugly Betty, Boardwalk Empire, and Madam Secretary. Ivey has appeared in numerous films, including The Color Purple, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Sabrina, The Addams Family, Sleepless in Seattle, The Help, The Leisure Seeker, and Ocean’s Eight. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2008.

Regina King is an actress, producer, and director. For her performances, she has been honored with Academy, Golden Globe, and Emmy awards. She made her debut on the TV series 227 and has gone on to star on television and film in Jerry Maguire, 24, The Leftovers, American Crime, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Big Bang Theory, Watchmen, The Harder They Fall, and dozens more. She has directed episodes of Southland, Scandal, Shameless, The Good Doctor, This Is Us, Insecure, the documentary Story of a Village, and the film One Night in Miami. Upcoming projects include the role of Shirley Chisholm in the film Shirley.

Charles Johnson, a 1998 MacArthur fellow, was the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. His fiction includes Faith and the Good Thing, Dreamer, Oxherding Tale, and Middle Passage—for which he won the National Book Award—and the short story collections The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Soulcatcher and Other Stories, Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories, and Night Hawks. His nonfiction books include Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling, and three collections of comic art. In 2002, he received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

David Sedaris is a humorist, author, comedian, and radio contributor. He is the author of Calypso, Theft By Finding, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He is also the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. Sedaris’s pieces appear regularly in The New Yorker and have twice been included in The Best American Essays. His original radio pieces can be heard on This American Life, and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4. Sedaris and his sister Amy have collaborated on several plays under the name “The Talent Family,” including Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and The Book of Liz. In 2013, A feature film adaptation of his story “C.O.G.” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the art book David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium was published in 2017. His essay collection Happy-Go-Lucky was published this past May.

Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Her second, The Autograph Man, won The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Smith’s third novel, On Beauty, won the Orange Prize for Fiction, A Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her fourth novel, NW, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Swing Time, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker 2017. Her first essay collection, Changing My Mind, was published in 2009 and her second, Feel Free, in 2018. Smith is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists. She writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University. Her latest collection of essays, Intimations, was published in July 2020. Her recent play, The Wife of Willesden, earned her a 2022 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award.

Jean Stafford (1915 - 1979) was a renowned novelist and short story writer. She was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1970 for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, which also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She published three novels in addition to her many short stories: Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, and The Catherine Wheel, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1953. Stafford was a frequent contributor to numerous literary publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Kenyon Review.

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. She is excited to be the new host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts.

CREDITS

“Cultural Relativity” by Charles Johnson. From Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories by Charles Johnson. Copyright © 2005 by Charles Johnson. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt Literary Agency, Inc.

“The Lazy River,” by Zadie Smith, from The New Yorker (December 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Zadie Smith. Used by permission of Rogers Coleridge and White, Ltd.

“The Hope Chest” by Jean Stafford. Copyright © 1969 by Jean Stafford. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening.