Carrie Coon currently stars on HBO’s Emmy–nominated series The Gilded Age. She is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has performed in Mary Page Marlowe, Three Sisters, The March, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which also ran on Broadway, earning Coon a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress and a Theatre World Award. She returned to Broadway starring in the 2026 revival of Bug by Tracy Letts, earning a Tony nomination for Best Actress. Her film and television credits include Gone Girl, The Post, Widows, Avengers: Infinity War, The Nest, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Sinner, The Leftovers (Critics’ Choice Television Award), Fargo, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Boston Strangler, His Three Daughters, Another Happy Day, and Lake George. Coon received the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama for her performances in The Leftovers and Fargo. Coon most recently starred in the third season of HBO’s The White Lotus. Upcoming projects include the films Harmonia and I Am Not Your Mother.

Florencia Cuenca is a Mexican immigrant theatermaker passionate about developing projects that celebrate the intersection of diversity, women, LGBTQ+, and Latine communities. She starred on Broadway in Real Women Have Curves. Her Off-Broadway credits include Children of Salt and A Never-Ending Line. As a singer-songwriter, she has performed at prestigious venues including Lincoln Center, Joe’s Pub, 54 Below, MASS MoCA, Little Island, and Washington Performing Arts. Her album, Broadway en Spanglish, was released by Concord Theatricals Recordings. Cuenca was honored with the HOLA Award for Outstanding Performance in Musical Theatre for her performance in Desaparecidas. Her selected credits as director include Desaparecidas at JACK, A Never-Ending Line in Mexico City, and ROJA at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Festival of New Musicals. Cuenca has received fellowships and residencies from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, the Johnny Mercer Writers Grove at Goodspeed Musicals, the Guild Hall William P. Rayner Artist-in-Residence, and the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat.

Zach Grenier has worked extensively on stage and received a Tony nomination for Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations for his performance as Ludwig van Beethoven. Films include She Said, Fight Club, Zodiac, Ride with the Devil, and Twister. He’s known on television for portraying David Lee on The Good Wife and its spin-off The Good Fight, Mayor Feratti on Ray Donovan, Andy Cramed on Deadwood, and Kenton on Alex Garland's Devs. Additional television series include Law & Order and 24. Grenier can currently be seen playing retired profiler Peter Olsen on FBI.

Andy Mientus is a writer and actor who has appeared on Broadway as Marius in the revival of Les Misérables, and Hanschen in the revival of Spring Awakening, which he co-conceived with director Michael Arden. On television, he was a series regular on the NBC musical drama Smash and the NBC/Universal series Gone. He also played Hartley Rathaway, a.k.a. the Pied Piper on the hit CW series The Flash. Additional television roles include Disinherited on FX, Grendel and Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings (GLAAD Media Award) both for Netflix, as well as Anger Management, Law & Order: SVU, Chasing Life, and the CBS pilot LFE. His Off-Broadway credits include the revival of Carrie at the Lucille Lortel Theater and The Jonathan Larson Project at the Orpheum Theater (Ghostlight Records). Additional theater credits include Wicked (National Tour), The Who’s Tommy (Denver Center), Moisés Kaufman’s revival of Bent (Mark Taper Forum), Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (Studebaker Theater), and recently, Immediate Family (Blumenthal Arts, directed by Phylicia Rashad). Andy made his London stage debut in The View UpStairs at Soho Theatre. He wrote the book and lyrics to Burn All Night, produced by the American Repertory Theater, the middle-grade fiction series The Backstagers, and the musical WEST, which is currently being developed by Center Theatre Group and At Rise Creative with an eye toward future production. Andy’s debut novel, Fraternity, was recently published by Amulet Books/Abrams and is available online and in bookstores nationwide. Mientus trained at the University of Michigan immediately prior to making his professional debut in Spring Awakening directed by Michael Mayer.

Susan Pourfar has worked on and Off-Broadway for more than two decades, garnering an Obie Award, a Theater World Award, and the Clarence Derwent Award from Actor’s Equity. Her most recent stage appearances include the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize finalist Meet the Cartozians and the Broadway production of Mary Jane. Susan has appeared in a variety of award-winning television shows including The Beast in Me, Black Mirror, House of Cards, Scandal, The Sinner, Winning Time, and The Staircase. Films include Manchester by the Sea, In the Heights, A Journal for Jordan, and the upcoming independent feature Last Hand. She is currently working on the film Hello Darkness, and will appear in the Apple TV series The Off Weeks. Pourfar is a proud and frequent collaborator in staged readings of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States. She is currently reading Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series aloud for a home audience.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.

Laurie Lathem writes fiction, essays, and plays. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The New England Review, Electric Literature, Cream City Review, The Plentitudes Journal, About Place Journal, and others. She has been awarded a 2026 Trout Lily Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center and was longlisted for the 2026 Disquiet Fiction Contest. Her story “Dildo Story” won third place in the 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Fiction, and “The Flamingo Café” won the 2026 Stella Kupferberg Prize. She is a recent alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. Lathem is at work on a collection of short stories.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of the short story collections The Souvenir Museum, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, and Thunderstruck, winner of the Story Prize; and the novels The Giant’s House, a National Book Award finalist; Niagara Falls All Over Again, winner of the PEN New England Award; An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination; Bowlaway; The Hero of this Book; and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. McCracken currently holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas, Austin.

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels, including Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner’s Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, Operation Wandering Soul, Galatea 2.2, Gain, Plowing The Dark, The Time of Our Singing, Generosity: An Enhancement, Orfeo, and Bewilderment, among others. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award in 2006 for his novel The Echo Maker. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, most recently for his novel Playground in 2024. His book The Overstory, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018, also won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, Conjunctions, Zoetrope, and Esquire, among others. His fiction often explores the effects of science and technology on humanity.

Jessica Treadway is the author of four novels and four story collections, and is a recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. “First Day” is part of her newest book I Felt My Life with Both My Hands, published this spring by Cornerstone Press. Treadway is a Senior Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston.

Cyn Vargas is the author of Nothing’s Ever The Same, which received a starred review from Booklist, and On The Way, named one of Book Scrolling’s Best Short Story Collections of All Time. Her fiction has appeared in Split Lip, Word Riot, the Chicago Reader's Fiction Issue, and other literary magazines, and one of her stories, “Myrna's Dad,” has been performed three times at public radio’s Selected Shorts. Of Mayan descent, she is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago, has led workshops at Ragdale and Interlochen Center for the Arts, and was voted Stories Matter Foundation's 2022 Instructor of the Year by her students. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. www.cynvargas.com