Julie Benko became a Broadway sensation as Fanny Brice in the recent revival of Funny Girl, earning the Dorothy Loudon Award for her performance and a New York Times “Breakout Star” nod for her celebrated understudy-to-star journey in the show. Additional Broadway appearances include Ragtime, Harmony, Fiddler on the Roof, and Les Misérables, as well as in the national tour of Spring Awakening. Favorite regional credits include My Fair Lady, Jane Eyre, Once, Guys and Dolls, Our Town, Rags, and more. Benko recently made her film debut in the award-winning indie feature Caravan, and has released three critically acclaimed studio albums with her pianist-husband Jason Yeager (available on all streaming platforms). Her newest record, Euphonic Gumbo, which celebrates the music of New Orleans, has just been released on Club44 Records. Julie is also an emerging playwright; her full-length play Down the Line was named as semifinalist at the Eugene O’Neill Center’s National Playwright Conference and is currently in development. She holds an MFA in Acting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. For more, visit www.JulieBenko.com or follow her @jujujuliebee.

Brandon J. Dirden recently played the role of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, opposite Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. Additionally, he has starred on Broadway as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Tony Award–winning production of All the Way with Bryan Cranston, as Booster in the Tony Award–winning revival of August Wilson’s Jitney, in Skeleton Crew, for which he was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards, the 2022 revival of Take Me Out, and in Clybourne Park, Enron, and Prelude to a Kiss. His many Off-Broadway appearances include the world premiere of Detroit ’67 and The Piano Lesson, for which he won Obie, Theatre World, and AUDELCO awards. On screen he has appeared in The Good Wife, The Big C, Public Morals, Manifest, The Get Down, The Accidental Wolf, Blue Bloods, The Quad, For Life, Mrs. America, and four seasons as Agent Aderholt on FX’s hit series The Americans. Dirden is an Associate Arts Professor in the Graduate Acting Program at NYU Tisch and a proud member of Actors Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA.

Raúl E. Esparza is a Four-time Tony Award nominee in every acting category and recipient of the OBIE, two New York Outer Critics Awards, the Barrymore, the LA Ovation Award, the Jose Ferrer Award, three Drama Desk Awards, and the Theater World Award. His television and film credits include A Murder at the End of the World, Candy, Dopesick, Law & Order: SVU, Hannibal, The Path, Bojack Horseman, Pushing Daisies, Find Me Guilty, Custody, Ferdinand, Elian, My Soul to Take, and Trouble in the Heights. His Broadway credits include Leap of Faith, Arcadia, Speed-the-Plow, The Homecoming, Company, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Taboo, Cabaret, and The Rocky Horror Show. Off-Broadway, he has had roles in Seared, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Normal Heart, Comedians, tick, tick... BOOM!, and in the Encores series: Anyone Can Whistle, The Cradle Will Rock, Road Show, and Oliver! At the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park, Esparza has performed in Twelfth Night and Cymbeline. His regional stage credits include Jesus Christ Superstar (Hollywood Bowl); My Fair Lady; Galileo; The Waves; Cry, The Beloved Country; Slaughterhouse-Five; and Fur. He has performed in Chess, as well as the 2002 Sondheim Celebration Sunday in the Park with George, and Merrily We Roll Along at the Kennedy Center, on the National Tour of Evita (20th anniversary tour), and was the host, creator, and producer of the online project Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Celebration.

Brian Lehrer is host of The Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC Radio's daily call-in program, covering politics and life, locally, and globally, and has been recognized with a George Foster Peabody Award for "Radio That Builds Community Rather Than Divides." The show airs weekdays from 10am–noon on WNYC 93.9 FM, AM 820 and wnyc.org. The show is also distributed via podcasts and on-demand audio. Lehrer has been a questioner in televised New York City Mayoral Debates for every election since 1997. He also writes a weekly column in The Brian Lehrer Show newsletter, and hosts national specials in the series America, Are We Ready?

Jay O. Sanders has narrated audiobooks and documentaries. His stage credits include Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 and 2 at Theatre for a New Audience, the title roles in Cyrano de Bergerac at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Uncle Vanya at the Hunter, Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee in Purlie Victorious on Broadway, Primary Trust, Girl from the North Country, This World of Tomorrow, Any Minute Now, and all 12 plays of Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama. He and wife, Maryann Plunkett, received a joint New York Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award. On screen, Sanders has recently been seen in Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters and forthcoming in M. Night Shyamalan’s Remain.

Dave Eggers is the author of The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, A Hologram for the King, What Is the What, and The Museum of Rain, among other books. He is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing centers, and Art + Water, a nonprofit visual art hub on San Francisco’s waterfront. A classically trained artist and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Eggers has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is the recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the American Book Award. In 2024, The Eyes and the Impossible was awarded the Newbery Medal. His latest novel, Contrapposto, will be published on June 9th.

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary, which was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second novel, Terrace Story, was named a best book of 2023 by Time magazine, The New Yorker, and the LA Times, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and Conjunctions. She teaches fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of classic and contemporary Latin American writers such as Armonía Somers, Jorge Luis Borges, Lolita Copacabana, and Ariel Magnus for a wide array of publications, and writes reviews and criticism for several different outlets in Spanish and English including the Times Literary Supplement, Revista Ñ, and Otra Parte.

Steven Millhauser is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novel Martin Dressler, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and We Others: New and Selected Stories, winner of The Story Prize in 2011 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work has been translated into eighteen languages, and his story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. Millhauser’s most recent collection, Disruptions, was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and The New Yorker.

Eloy Tizón is a Spanish writer. He has published several novels and short story collections. He was nominated for the Herralde Award for his novel Seda salvaje in 1995, and his short story collection Técnicas de iluminación won the Tormenta Prize for Book of the Year in 2013 and was nominated for the Spanish Critics’ Award and the Setenil Prize for short stories. His stories have been published in several anthologies such as Best European Fiction 2013. Tizón writes literary reviews in the Spanish literary magazine Revista de Libros and has bylines in El País, El Mundo, Público, Telva, Revista de Occidente, and Turia. He has taught in the Kafka Hotel Centre for Creative Arts, the Fuentetaja Creative Writing Workshops, The Writers’ School, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, and in the Higher School of Arts and Entertainment (TAI). Tizón’s work has been translated into English, French, German, Finnish, and Arabic.