Crystal Dickinson recently starred in The Blood Quilt and Broke-ology at Lincoln Center. She won the Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut in the 2012 production of Clybourne Park and subsequently appeared in You Can’t Take It With You on Broadway in 2014. Her additional theater credits include A Raisin in the Sun, Seven Guitars, Wine in the Wilderness, and Gem of the Ocean at Two River Theater, Lessons in Survival at the Vineyard, The Low Road and Cullud Wattah at The Public, Covenant at the Roundabout, The Trees at Playwright’s Horizons, and Blues for an Alabama Sky at the McCarter. Her film and television credits include The Accidental Wolf, I Origins, The Good Wife, Feed the Beast, New Amsterdam, and recurring roles on The CHI and For Life. Dickinson has taught at Stella Adler Studio, Spelman College, Pace University, Princeton University, the Juilliard School, NYU, University of Illinois, and Seton Hall.

Philip Estrera is a NYC-based actor whose theater credits include Orphan of Zhao at La Jolla Playhouse and Monstress at the American Conservatory Theater. He appeared in the Sesame Street Thanksgiving special as Anton the bus driver, which introduced the first Asian American puppet to the series, and has guest-starred on Blue Bloods and New Amsterdam. He is also active in the New York indie film scene. A graduate of the American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program, Estrera is also part of the marketing and producing staff at The Tent Theater, where he supports new work and the ongoing artistry of established Elder American playwrights.

Dawn Akemi Saito is an actor, writer, director, and teacher whose credits include Insects in Heat, Suns Are Suns, Blood Cherries, HA, Knock on the Sky, Suicide Forest, Hiroshima Maiden, Arden/Ardennes, My House Is Collapsing Toward One Side, and Deshima. Her multi-disciplinary works have been performed at the Walker Art Center, Orpheum Theatre in Austria, the Whitney Museum, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Theater Workshop, LaMaMa, New World Theater, the Public Theater, and Aaron Davis Hall. Saito is a Clinical Professor at Fordham University/Lincoln Center, is on the Physical Acting faculty at Juilliard, and serves as co-director of the Summer Theatre Devising Intensive at Bard College in Berlin, Germany.

Madeline Cohen is the Director of Symphony Space’s adult literacy program, All Write! She held the position of Education Director at Symphony Space from 1989 - 2022, and has been working in arts education for 48 years as a teaching artist, staff development leader, administrator, and consultant at Lincoln Center Institute, United Federation of Teachers, and Teachers College, among others. In addition, she is a costume designer.

Coleman Barks is a poet and translator who has translated more than a dozen volumes of Rumi’s poetry. Barks’s translation work was the focus of an episode of Bill Moyers’ PBS series The Language of Life, and he has collaboratively produced his Rumi translations with music and dance ensembles including the Paul Winter Consort and Zuleikha. He has published numerous original poetry collections, including Winter Sky, Gourd Seed, and The Juice.

Sandra Cisneros is the author of the novels The House on Mango Street; Caramelo; Have You Seen Marie?; Martita, I Remember You; the poetry collections Bad Boys; My Wicked, Wicked Ways; Loose Woman; and Woman Without Shame; the short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories; and the memoir A House of My Own. She is the recipient of two NEA fellowships for poetry and fiction, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Texas Medal of the Arts, and in 2015 was honored with the National Medal of Arts.

Meron Hadero was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child after living briefly in Germany. She graduated from Princeton and Yale Law School before receiving an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, Boulevard, The Offing, The Normal School, Addis Ababa Noir, and the 2021 edition of Best American Short Stories, among other publications. In 2022, she published her debut short story collection, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, for which she was awarded the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Hadero was the first Ethiopian-born winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing.

Gish Jen’s latest work, the novel Bad Bad Girl, was published in October 2025. She has written several novels, short story collections, and nonfiction works, including Typical American; Who’s Irish?; The Resisters; and Thank You, Mr. Nixon. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Her honors include the Lannan Award for Literature and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Jen currently sits on the board of the MacArthur Foundation.

Ted Kooser, the United States Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems Delights & Shadows, and has been honored with the Pushcart Prize five times. He is the author of children’s books, several books of nonfiction, and over a dozen full-length volumes of poetry, including Sure Signs, The Blizzard Voices, Valentines, Splitting an Order, Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air, and most recently Raft. Kooser’s work has appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Pushcart Prize anthology, The Writer’s Almanac, and numerous other publications and collections. Kooser is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Nebraska.

Willie Perdomo is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix, The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime. Winner of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, the New York City Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN Open Book Award, Perdomo was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. He is co-editor of the anthology Latínext, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Washington Post, The Best American Poetry 2019, and African Voices. Perdomo is currently a Lucas Arts Literary Fellow, a core faculty member at VONA/Voices of our Nation Writing Workshop, and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, better known in the U.S. as Rumi, was a Persian philosopher, theologian, poet, teacher, and founder of the Mevlevi (or Mawlawi) order of Sufism. He lived in the 13th century, yet his writings have been read by people from all over the world for seven hundred years.