Bobby Cannavale is a two-time Emmy Award winner for his work on Will & Grace and Boardwalk Empire. Additional film and television credits include The Station Agent; Nurse Jackie, for which he received two Emmy nominations; Blue Jasmine; Ant-Man; Vinyl; Master of None; I, Tonya; Homecoming; Angie Tribeca; Motherless Brooklyn; The Irishman; The Jesus Rolls; Mr. Robot; BoJack Horseman; Superintelligence; Jolt; Nine Perfect Strangers; The Watcher; Blue Moon; Only Murders in the Building; Scarpetta; Man on Fire; and One Night Only, among others. On stage, Cannavale has appeared in Mauritius, for which he earned a Tony nomination, The Motherf**ker With the Hat, for which he won a Drama Desk Award and earned a Tony nomination, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Big Knife, The Lifespan of a Fact, Medea at BAM, and most recently Art on Broadway.

Sam Kebede is a first-generation Ethiopian/Eritrean-American writer/performer. He has had his works presented at venues including The Public, Ars Nova, New Victory Theater, and Victory Gardens Theater. Sam is also the creator and lead artist behind Lack History, a comedy variety game show about BIPOC history where all the proceeds are donated to grassroots social justice causes. Sam wrote for the Taiwanese TV show Tough Bobas, and has had his plays presented across the country. He regularly performs stand-up across the globe.

When you think of Sonia Manzano, you immediately think of children and television. Her most recent accomplishment was creating a children’s program, Alma’s Way, for PBS Kids. The series has won two Imagen Awards for Best Youth Programing, a 2022 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program, and a 2023 NAACP nomination for an Image Award. Ms. Manzano is best known for performing the role of Maria on Sesame Street for 44 seasons, where her work affected the lives of millions of parents and children and garnered her two Emmy Award nominations in addition to the National Academy of Arts and Science’s Lifetime Achievement Daytime Emmy in 2016. As a writer for the show, she took home 15 Emmys. In 2022, Manzano was honored with the Beacon Award from PBS. She is also an author whose most recent Scholastic novel, Coming Up Cuban, set in 1959, follows the lives of four children who represent different intersections of race and class during the Cuban Revolution.

Cynthia Nixon made her film debut in Little Darlings at 12 and her Broadway debut at 14 in The Philadelphia Story. Since then she’s appeared in more than 40 plays (a dozen on Broadway), scores of films and TV shows, and won 2 Emmys, 2 Tonys, and a GRAMMY. She is best known for her role as Miranda on HBO’s Sex and the City, and in the sequel series And Just Like That…. Nixon appeared on numerous "Best Actress of 2017" lists for her portrayal of Emily Dickinson in Terrence Davies' much-lauded film A Quiet Passion. In 2018 she ran for Governor of New York State, putting issues of economic, racial, and gender equality front and center. She and her wife, Christine Marinoni, live in Manhattan and have 3 children—Sam, Charlie, and Max. Recently, Nixon starred alongside June Squibb in Marjorie Prime on Broadway. She can currently be seen on Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age, also on HBO.

Shirley Rumierk is best known from NBC's Manifest as well as CBS's East New York, The Equalizer, and HBO's Scenes from a Marriage. She was a series regular on NBC's Rise and had a multi-episode arc on Netflix's Teenage Bounty Hunters, with additional television credits including Chicago P.D. On film, she appeared in David Frankel's Collateral Beauty, and on stage she recently appeared in the Off-Broadway premiere of Sancocho at WP Theater. Rumierk is a board member and alumna of The 52nd Street Project and an alumna of Oliver Scholars. She is a graduate of Harvard University.

Lorraine Avila is an author and educator whose titles include Malcriada, Celestial Summer, and The Making of Yolanda La Bruja, which was voted one of 2023’s Best Books for Teens by the New York Public Library. Her work has appeared in Latino USA, Bitch Media, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Asterix Journal, and Catapult, among other publications. Avila has been honored with grants and fellowships from the Pittsburgh Foundation, Writers Colony, and the University of Pittsburgh, among other institutions, and has taught writing workshops at New York University, Brown University, and Stanford University.

Patricia Engel is the author of the short story collection The Faraway World, a New York Times Editors’ Choice; the novels Infinite Country, a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club selection; The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia’s national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, and herself a dual citizen, Patricia is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Miami.

Elissa Nelson (1976 – 2013) was a teacher and writer when she died at 37, after many years of battling a brain tumor. Her stories appeared in The Sun, The Utne Reader, Seventeen Magazine, A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World anthology, and other publications; she also wrote a journal for Slate about her job as a telephone psychic. She often read her stories at Leslie Ball’s Balls Cabaret and premiered a short story at the Walker Art Center, both in Minneapolis. Elissa wrote Hope Zine for almost two decades, chronicling her personal and artistic life, including the Radical Cheerleaders of NYC, 9/11, her brain tumor journey, and her guerrilla performance group FMRL (say it out loud) whose stated goal was to “make art that happens and then disappears . . . to jaywalk through the intersection of public and private space in New York City.” A co-founder of the Bard College Zine Library, Elissa was a graduate of Bard, with a master’s in teaching from Brooklyn College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Some of her writing is archived in her blog, Formerly Known As a Zine. At the time of her death, she was finishing the best novel ever written.

Frank Sullivan (1892 - 1976) was a journalist, humorist, and longtime contributor to The New Yorker. His works include Innocent Bystandings, Broccoli and Old Lace, A Pearl in Every Oyster, A Rock in Every Snowball, The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down, and the posthumous collection Frank Sullivan at His Best. Sullivan’s papers are held by his hometown library in Saratoga Springs.

Thomas Wolfe (1900 – 1938) was a novelist, short story writer, and influential figure in the literary canon of the Southern Renaissance. He wrote numerous novels, story collections, and plays, including Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; From Death to Morning; The Web and the Rock; You Can’t Go Home Again; and Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. Wolfe’s short fiction appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other publications. A staged adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel appeared on Broadway in 1958, earning six Tony nominations and winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.