True Confessions

Michael Cerveris is the two-time Tony Award and Grammy Award-winning Broadway star of Fun Home and Assassins. Additional Broadway credits include Sweeney Todd, The Who's Tommy, Evita, Titanic, LoveMusik, Cymbeline, Hedda Gabler, Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), and many others. Off-Broadway, he has appeared in King Lear, Road Show, Nine Lives, and Nassim and many more. His film and television credits include Fringe, Treme, Madam Secretary, The Good Wife, The Mexican, Cirque Du Freak, The Tick, Gotham, Mosaic, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Elementary, Evil, and The Plot Against America. Cerveris also works as a musician, both solo and with his band, Loose Cattle, which just released a new album Heavy Lifting. He can be seen in the forthcoming Julian Fellowes series The Gilded Age for HBOMax.

Jane Curtin has appeared on Broadway in Noises Off, Candida, and Our Town. Her off-Broadway work includes Love Letters and the musical revue Pretzels, which she co-wrote. She starred in the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun and won back-to-back Emmy Awards for her role on Kate & Allie. She is an original cast member of Saturday Night Live and also starred in the television film series The Librarian and its spin-off, The Librarians. Her film credits include Coneheads; Antz; I Love You, Man; I Don’t Know How She Does It; The Heat; The Spy Who Dumped Me; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; and Ode to Joy. She starred on the television series Unforgettable and has had guest appearances on The Good Wife, 48 Hours ’til Monday, The Good Fight, Broad City, and most recently, United We Fall and Godmothered. Curtin will appear in the forthcoming films Welcome to Pine Grove!, Never Too Late, and Queen Bees.

Carlos Greaves is an Afro-Latino engineer, writer and filmmaker based in Boston. He teaches online satire writing at The Second City, and is the editor of the satirical news site RF News. His writing has been featured in The New Yorker and he is a frequent contributor to the humor site McSweeney’s, where he wrote three of the site’s top 20 most-read articles of 2020.

Peter Francis James has appeared on Broadway in Hillary and Clinton, Present Laughter, The Merchant of Venice, On Golden Pond, Drowning Crow, and Judgment at Nuremberg. His Off-Broadway credits include Stuff Happens, for which he won the Obie, Lucille Lortel, and Drama Desk Award; Much Ado About Nothing and Venus at the Public Theater; The Maids (Obie Award) at Classic Stage Company; The Lady From Dubuque at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket; and Cymbeline with the Royal Shakespeare Company. His screen credits include Oz, Boardwalk Empire, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, Rough Night, The Code, The Bold Type, Godfather of Harlem, and Katy Keene. James has narrated more than 60 audiobooks.

Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (1882 – 1956) was an English poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and children’s book author. Though best known for his stories about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and poetry collections When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, Milne was a prolific writer, penning essays, novels, poetry collections, storybooks, plays, and screenplays throughout his lifetime.

James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, he directed the Tony-nominated productions of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Paul Newman. He also directed the television production of Our Town for Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including The Devil Wears Prada, Damages, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, The Blacklist, The Affair, Equity, Odd Mom Out, The Tap, The Independents, The Romanoffs, and The Accidental Wolf.

Anthony Ramos was featured in the original cast of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning Broadway phenomenon Hamilton and stars in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature film of In the Heights directed by Jon M. Chu. He appeared in the Academy Award-winning film A Star Is Born. Additional credits include Monsters and Men, for which he won the Imagen Award for Best Actor in a Feature Film, Honest Thief starring Liam Neeson, Godzilla: King of Monsters, and the Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It, created by Spike Lee. His debut album, The Good & The Bad, debuted in the Top 10 on iTunes Pop Albums Chart and was followed by a North American Tour. Ramos recently released a new single and music video entitled Stop. He is on the Artistic Advisory Board of Opening Act, a theater program for underserved high schools in New York City. Ramos can currently be seen in the HBO series In Treatment. Forthcoming projects include the films Distant, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and the series Blindspotting.

Rita Wolf most recently appeared off-Broadway at the Public Theater in Richard Nelson’s The Michaels. She will return for the second installment of Nelson’s family saga, in The Michaels Abroad, when the world reopens. She has also been featured in the premiere of Hammaad Chaudhury's debut play An Ordinary Muslim at The New York Theatre Workshop and Emma and Max at The Flea Theatre, written and directed by Todd Solondz. Additional New York theater credits include David Greig’s The American Pilot at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and the premiere of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at New York Theatre Workshop and later at BAM. Her film credits include Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, Spike Lee's Girl 6, Coronation Street, Wing and a Prayer, and The Good Wife. Wolf is featured in the Audible recording of Evil Eye, a noir drama written by Madhuri Shekar.

Jennifer Lim made her Broadway debut starring in David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish, for which she earned a Theater World Award for Outstanding Broadway Debut, the IASNY Trophy for Excellence, and a Drama Desk nomination. Additional theater projects include Golden Child at Signature Theatre, The World of Extreme Happiness at Manhattan Theatre Club, Usual Girls at Roundabout Theater Company, The Urban Retreat at the Public Theater, and Fefu and Her Friends at Theatre For A New Audience. Her film and television credits include Law & Order, The Good Wife, Elementary, Hell on Wheels, Instinct, Impossible Monsters, Jessica Jones, High Maintenance, and Prodigal Son. She will appear in the forthcoming films Irresistible, Naked Singularity, and The Stand-In.

Laura Chow Reeve is a writer and illustrator. She has a M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA and has attended workshops at Tin House and VONA/Voices. Reeve is a winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Senior Editor at Joyland Magazine. She is working on her first novel.

Baron Vaughn is a writer, producer, director, actor, and comedian, who currently appears on Netflix's Grace & Frankie and the host of SYFY's The Great Debate. Additional television credits include Fairly Legal, Comedy Bang! Bang!, Girls, Right Now Kapow, BoJack Horseman, Superstore, Corporate, Those Who Can’t, Black-ish, Wild Life, and as the voice of Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000. He is also the creator of the documentary Fatherless. As a stand-up comedian, Vaughn tours widely and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Half Hour. He has two comedy recordings, Raised by Cable and Blaxistential Crisis, and is the co-creator and co-host of Comedy Central’s The New Negroes. Upcoming projects include The Time Capsule and Scroll Wheel of Time.

Credits

“As a 28-Year-Old Latino, I’m Shocked My New Novel, Memoirs of a Middle-Aged White Lady, Has Been So Poorly Received” by Carlos Greaves, from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (January 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Carlos Greaves. Used by permission of the author.

“The Rise and Fall of Mortimer Scrivens” by A. A. Milne.

“1,000-Year-Old Ghosts” by Laura Chow Reeve, from PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017 (Catapult, 2017). First appeared in Hyphen Magazine (2016). Copyright © 2016 by Laura Chow Reeve. Used by permission of HG Literary.