The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Brooke Gladstone has been host of On the Media for all of the 21st century. Before that she was Senior Editor of NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and of All Things Considered. After that, she reported from Moscow for three years, moved to New York to inaugurate NPR's first-ever media beat, and then finally settled downtown to re-launch On the Media in October 2000. Over the decades, Brooke has collected two Peabody Awards, a National Press Club Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, and many others, including Maximumfun.org's Special Citation for Achievements In Being Awesome. She's the author of The Influencing Machine, a treatise on the media in graphic form, which was listed among the "10 Master-pieces of Graphic Nonfiction" by The Atlantic; and a monograph, The Trouble with Reality.

Mary Gordon is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, literary critic, and was the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College until 2020. She is the author of many books, including Final Payments, Circling My Mother, Reading Jesus, The Shadow Man, The Company of Women, On Thomas Merton, Payback, and three collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, an O Henry Award, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2008, Governor Eliot Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New York State Author and gave her the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction. She was inducted as a member of the inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2010.

Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian American who was born in Addis Ababa and came to the U.S. via Germany as a young child. Meron's short stories have won the 2021 Caine Prize for African Writing, been shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing, and appeared in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, and others. She's also been published in The New York Times Book Review, the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. A 2019-2020 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and a fellow at Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell, Meron holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School, and a BA in history from Princeton with a certificate in American studies. Her collection A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times was published in 2022, and was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and winner of the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction.

David Michael Kaplan has written two short story collections, Comfort and Skating in the Dark, and two editions of a writing guide, Revision: A Creative Approach to Writing and Rewriting Fiction and Rewriting. His story “Doe Season” was named one of the Best American Short Stories of 1985, and his story “Stand” was collected in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Stories. Kaplan’s stories have also been honored with the Nelson Agren Award for short fiction. He is Professor Emeritus in writing at Loyola University Chicago.

Richard Masur is recognized for a variety of roles over his 45-year career on TV series including The Hot l Baltimore, One Day at a Time, Rhoda, and more recently, Transparent, Girls, Younger, The Good Wife/Fight, Bull, The Equalizer, and Kaleidoscope, currently on Netflix. Additional television, miniseries, and movie credits include Fallen Angel, Adam, The Burning Bed, It, And the Band Played On, 61*, and The Girls on the Bus on HBO Max. He has appeared in more than 60 feature films, including The Thing, Heartburn, Risky Business, My Girl, License to Drive, Tumbledown, Lonely Boys, Don’t Think Twice, Hudson, Before/During/After, and Another Year Together. Masur’s stage work on Broadway includes Lucky Guy, Democracy, The Changing Room, and Prayer for the French Republic. Off-Broadway, he has performed in Sarah, Sarah; The Ruby Sunrise; Fetch Clay, Make Man; Relevance; Two Jews, Talking; and Dirty Laundry, among others.

Bebe Neuwirth has been dancing and singing and working in theater, television, and film for the last 40 years. Some of her credits on Broadway are: A Chorus Line, Little Me, Dancin’, Sweet Charity (Tony Award), Damn Yankees, The Addams Family, Chicago (Tony, Drama Desk, Astaire Award, etc.), Fosse, Gutenberg! The Musical, and most recently, Cabaret, for which she won the 2024 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Performance in a Musical. Off-Broadway, she has starred in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Here Lies Jenny, The Bedwetter, and more. Neuwirth has appeared in regional productions of West Side Story, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Small Fire, among others. On television, she has appeared in Cheers, for which she won two Emmy Awards, Frasier, Blue Bloods, Bored to Death, The Flight Attendant, and Julia, among others, while her film credits include Green Card, Liberty Heights, Summer of Sam, Jumanji: The Next Level, Modern Persuasion, and tick…tick… BOOM! In 2023, Neuwirth was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, and her awards include the CTFD Rolex Dance Award, the Dance Magazine Award, and the Sarah Siddons Society Award, among many others. As a vice-chair of the Entertainment Community Fund, she founded the Dancers’ Resource—a program designed to address the emotional and physical challenges faced by professional dancers.

Chinasa Ogbuagu has been seen in works at New York Theater Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Realm, Lincoln Center, and in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of All My Sons on Broadway. She received a Lucille Lortel nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play for her performance in Sojourners. Her television credits include Mare of Easttown, The Girl from Plainville, Homeland, Bull, The Good Fight, and The Following. Ogbuagu most recently appeared in the 2024 horror film The Woods Are Real, which is streaming now.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.

CREDITS

“My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story About a Boy and a Dog,” by Mary Gordon. Used by permission of the author.

“A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times,” by Meron Hadero, from the short story collection A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times. Used by permission of the author.

“Love, Your Only Mother,” by David Michael Kaplan, from Comfort (Viking, 1987). Copyright © 1987 by David Michael Kaplan. Used by permission of the author.