Unexpected Guests

Willa Cather (1873 – 1947) was a canonical American writer, the peer of hercontemporaries Wharton, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. After graduating fromthe University of Nebraska, she spent two decades as a journalist, educator, and editor. With O Pioneers!, published when Cather was 40, she emerged as one of the most admired and widely read novelists of the early twentieth century. Cather wrote twelve novels, six collections of short fiction, a book of poetry, and a large body of nonfiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours and, in 1944, the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Academy Award nominee, Golden Globe Award, Critics’ Choice Award, and Emmy Award–winning actress Patricia Clarkson has recently been seen in the critically acclaimed and timely drama Monica. She will next be seen in the biopic Lilly, playing the title role of Fair Pay activist Lilly Ledbetter. Clarkson returned to the stage in early 2024 in London, in a West End production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, opposite Brian Cox. In 2015 Clarkson was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play and a Tony Award nomination for her role in The Elephant Man. On television, she was recently seen in the series Gray, in the lead role of Cornelia Gray, a CIA spy. In 2022, she was featured in AMC+/Sundance TV’s State of the Union, for which she won her third Emmy Award. 2019 garnered Clarkson the Golden Globe Award and Critics’ Choice Award for her role in HBO’s Sharp Objects. The same year she was honored with the prestigious Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema from the 54th annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. In 2018, Clarkson won the British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Sally Potter’s film The Party. Among her numerous accolades through the years, her 2003 role in Pieces of April earned her nominations for Academy Award, Golden Globe, SAG, Broadcast Film Critics, and Independent Spirit awards.

Santino Fontana is known for his Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Tony Award–winning portrayal of Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels in the Broadway production of Tootsie, and for voicing the character Prince Hans in Disney’s Academy Award–winning animated feature Frozen. Additionally, he has starred in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; 1776; and Zorba with Encores!; and on Broadway in The Importance of Being Earnest (Clarence Derwent Award); Brighton Beach Memoirs (Drama Desk Award); Act One; Billy Elliot; Cinderella (Tony nomination); and Hello, Dolly! His onscreen credits include Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Sisters, Shades of Blue, Mozart in the Jungle, Submissions Only, Off the Menu, Impossible Monsters, Fosse/Verdon, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Just One Kiss and Evil. Fontana recently starred in the Classic Stage Company’s revival of I Can Get it for You Wholesale. Upcoming projects include Lost & Found in Cleveland and Sunset Road.

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.

Dylan Marron made the podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me. He wrote a book of the same name, published in 2022 from Atria. He wrote for Ted Lasso. Most recently, Marron made a 6-part audio documentary called The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks.

Sarah Mezzanotte recently reprised her role in Lincoln Center's remounting of Sarah DeLappe's award-winning play The Wolves, which was also made into a feature film, and appeared in the Broadway revival of Six Degrees of Separation. She also starred in the world premiere of Dry Land, which garnered a New York Times Critics' Pick. Her film and television credits include Chambers on Netflix, Drunk Bus, The Blacklist, Blue Bloods, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Royal Pains, Blame, Olga Dies Dreaming, and the Amazon pilot The Interestings. Mezzanotte is a graduate of The Tisch School at NYU.

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

The works of Willa Cather are in the public domain.

“A Visit from the Tune Squad,” by Carlos Greaves. Commissioned by Symphony Space. Copyright © 2023 by Carlos Greaves and Symphony Space.