Brooke Gladstone has been host of On the Media for all of the 21st century. Before that she was Senior Editor of NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and of All Things Considered. After that, she reported from Moscow for three years, moved to New York to inaugurate NPR's first-ever media beat, and then finally settled downtown to re-launch On the Media in October 2000. Over the decades, Brooke has collected two Peabody Awards, a National Press Club Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, and many others, including Maximumfun.org's Special Citation for Achievements In Being Awesome. She's the author of The Influencing Machine, a treatise on the media in graphic form, which was listed among the "10 Master-pieces of Graphic Nonfiction" by The Atlantic; and a monograph, The Trouble with Reality. At WNYC's 2021 Christmas party, Brooke sang "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" with her sisters Lisa and Stacey, thus fulfilling all her dreams.

Richard Masur is recognized for a variety of roles over his 45-year career on TV series including The Hot l Baltimore, One Day at a Time, Rhoda, and more recently, Transparent, Girls, Younger, The Good Wife/Fight, Bull, The Equalizer, and Kaleidoscope, currently on Netflix. Additional television, miniseries, and movie credits include Fallen Angel, Adam, The Burning Bed, It, And the Band Played On, 61*, and this year’s The Girls on the Bus on HBO Max. He has appeared in more than 60 feature films, including The Thing, Heartburn, Risky Business, My Girl, License to Drive, Tumbledown, Lonely Boys, Don’t Think Twice, Hudson, Before/During/After, and Another Year Together. Masur’s stage work includes Lucky Guy, Democracy, and The Changing Room on Broadway. Off-Broadway, Sarah, Sarah; The Ruby Sunrise; Fetch Clay, Make Man; Relevance; and Two Jews, Talking; among others. He is, of course, delighted to be back at Symphony Space doing another Selected Shorts.

Bebe Neuwirth has been dancing and singing and working in theater, television, and film for the last 40 years. Some of her credits are: Broadway, A Chorus Line, Little Me, Dancin’, Sweet Charity (Tony Award), Damn Yankees, Addams Family, Chicago (Tony, Drama Desk, Astaire Award, etc.), and Fosse. Off-Broadway: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Here Lies Jenny, and more. Regional: West Side Story and The Taming of the Shrew, among others. London’s West End: Kiss of the Spider Woman. Television: Cheers (2 Emmy Awards), Frasier, Blue Bloods, Bored to Death, etc. Film: Green Card, Liberty Heights, Summer of Sam, Jumanji: The Next Level, Modern Persuasion, and tick…tick… BOOM!, etc. Albums: Porcelain and Stories in NYC (live at 54Below). Honors and awards: Career Transition for Dancers Rolex Dance Award, Dance Magazine Award, Honorary doctorate from Manhattan School of Music, Honorary Ziegfeld Girl, Honorary member of Local 1 (Stagehands’ Union). Neuwirth has recently been featured on the Audible adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s series The Sandman, Broadway on Demand’s A Marvelous Party, HBO Max’s Julia, and in the live improvisational comedy show Villain: DeBlanks.

Chinasa Ogbuagu has been seen in works at New York Theater Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Realm, Lincoln Center, and in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of All My Sons on Broadway. She received a Lucille Lortel nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play for her performance in Sojourners. Her television credits include Homeland, Bull, The Good Fight, and The Following. Ogbuagu was recently featured in the HBO Max series Mare of Easttown and can currently be seen in The Girl from Plainville on Hulu.

Calvin Leon Smith was recently seen in the role of Jasper on Amazon’s The Underground Railroad, on HBO's The Deuce and High Maintenance, and in the Public Theater's production of Fat Ham, which will be moving to Broadway in March. His theater credits include work at The Public Theater, Long Wharf Theatre, Clarence Brown Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, La Jolla Playhouse, and Shakespeare on the Sound. Smith is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the British American Drama Academy, and a 2018 graduate of The Juilliard School, where he received his MFA.

Kendra Fortmeyer is the author of the young adult novel Hole in the Middle. She received a 2017 Pushcart Prize for her story “Things I Know to Be True,” which was originally published in One Story and reprinted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She’s a recipient of grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Michener Center for Writers, Arvon Foundation and others, and a graduate of the 2016 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers workshop with an MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Her short fiction has appeared in The Toast, Lightspeed, Apex, and elsewhere.

Mary Gordon is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, literary critic, and was the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College until 2020. She is the author of many books, including Final Payments, Circling My Mother, Reading Jesus, The Shadow Man, The Company of Women, On Thomas Merton, Payback, and three collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, an O Henry Award, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2008, Governor Eliot Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New York State Author and gave her the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction. She was inducted as a member of the inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2010.

Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian American who was born in Addis Ababa and came to the U.S. via Germany as a young child. Meron's short stories have won the 2021 Caine Prize for African Writing, shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing, and appear in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, and others. She's also been published in The New York Times Book Review, the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. A 2019-2020 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and a fellow at Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell, Meron holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School, and a BA in history from Princeton with a certificate in American studies. Her collection A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times was published in 2022.

David Michael Kaplan has written two short story collections, Comfort and Skating in the Dark, and two editions of a writing guide, Revision: A Creative Approach to Writing and Rewriting Fiction and Rewriting. His story “Doe Season” was named one of the Best American Short Stories of 1985, and his story “Stand” was collected in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Stories. Kaplan’s stories have also been honored with the Nelson Agren Award for short fiction. He currently teaches writing at Loyola University Chicago.