Safe Distance

LeVar Burton is best known for his television work, most notably on the award-winning series Roots, Reading Rainbow, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Additional film and television credits include Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Ali, Community, The Big Bang Theory, Perception, and Weird City. He directed multiple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Enterprise, Charmed, Perception, NCIS: New Orleans, and the Disney Channel’s Smart House. Burton’s work has been honored with the Peabody Award and numerous Image and Emmy Awards, and a Grammy. He currently hosts the podcast LeVar Burton Reads and was recently a guest host on Jeopardy!

Eugenia W. Collier is the author of the short story collection Breeder and Other Stories and the play Ricky. She is best known for her widely anthologized short story “Marigolds,” winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction. Collier has contributed to Negro Digest, Black World, TV Guide, Phylon, and The New York Times, among other publications, and her work has been featured in anthologies including Impressions in Asphalt, Afro-American Writing, and Modern Black Poets. Collier served as English Chair at Morgan State University and taught English at numerous colleges and universities prior to her retirement in 1996.

Joanna Gleason is a Tony Award-winning actress best known for her roles on Broadway in I Love My Wife, Joe Egg, Into the Woods, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Her extensive film and television career includes Heartburn, Boogie Nights, Hannah and Her Sisters, Sex and the City, The West Wing, Tracey Ullman, Friends, Blue Bloods, The Affair, Sensitive Skin, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and The Bite. Gleason has received the New England Theatre Conference with a Special Award for Achievement in Theatre, the Rockefeller Award from SUNY Purchase for Artistic Achievement, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Occidental College. She is currently in post production for the feature film The Grotto, which she wrote and directed.

Laura Gómez is an actress and writer best known for her role as Bianca Flores on Orange Is the New Black. She has been featured on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the miniseries Show Me a Hero, Anne Plus, and The Last O.G., and can be seen in the forthcoming films Safari and heard in the animated film The Encounter. Gómez has directed three short films, The Iron Warehouse, Hallelujah, and To Kill a Roach, which won the NYU Technisphere Award in 2012. She is a member of Women Artists Writing, a non-profit group giving voices to female theater artists.

N. K. Jemisin is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author whose works include the novels The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Killing Moon, The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky, and the short story collection How Long ’Til Black Future Month? Jemisin is the first author to win three consecutive Hugo Awards, as well as the Locus and Nebula awards. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Weird Tales, WIRED, Helix, Strange Horizons, Popular Science, and TheNew York Times Book Review, among other publications. Her most recent novel, The City We Became, Book One in The Great Cities Trilogy, was published in March 2020. She also collaborates with artist Jamal Campbell on the comic book series Far Sector.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018) authored 21 novels, 11 volumes of short fiction, four essay collections, 12 children’s books, and six volumes of poetry over her celebrated career, including the Hainish Cycle and the Earthsea series. She was honored with the National Book Award, nine Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She was the second woman named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Le Guin is the subject of the documentary The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, and a biography of her life and work is forthcoming.

Sharon Washington is an actress and writer whose credits include the films The Kitchen and Joker. Additional film and television credits include City on a Hill, The Code, On the Basis of Sex, The Looming Tower, Wiener Dog, Malcolm X, Michael Clayton, Damages, Royal Pains, Blue Bloods, The Blacklist, Gotham, Law & Order: SVU, Madam Secretary, For Life, Down with the King, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, Bull, and the webseries Hustling, for which she won an Indie Series Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was featured on Broadway in The Scottsboro Boys musical. Her off-Broadway credits include Wild With Happy, Luce, While Yet I Live, Dot, and her solo play, Feeding the Dragon, which was nominated for a 2019 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show. Washington was the Primary Stages 2017-18 Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence.

CREDITS

“The Elevator Dancer” by N.K. Jemisin, from How Long ’Til Black Future Month? (Orbit, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by N.K. Jemisin. Used by permission of the author.

“Marigolds” by Eugenia W. Collier, from Breeder and Other Stories (Black Classic Press, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Eugenia W. Collier. Used by permission of Black Classic Press.

“The Wife’s Story” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Copyright © 1982. All Rights reserved.