Abubakr Ali starred in Anything’s Possible directed by Billy Porter and was the titular lead in the Netflix–Dark Horse series Grendel. Additional selected screen credits include Law & Order: Organized Crime, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Power Book II: Ghost, and Katy Keene. Onstage, he has been seen in Toros at Second Stage, Inherit the Wind at the Pasadena Playhouse, We Live in Cairo with the American Repertory Theatre, Kiss and Twelfth Night at the Yale Repertory Theatre, and work with The 24 Hour Plays, Primary Stages, New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theater Company, and The Public, among others. Ali is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Fresh off the World Premiere of Cult of Love at Berkeley Rep, Molly Bernard is most recognizable for her role as Lauren Heller on Younger. Additionally, she starred in and executive produced the indie film Milkwater, and has been featured in the Amazon film Master opposite Regina Hall, the independent feature Lone Star Bull, and Chicago Med on NBC, as well as Transparent, Alpha House, High Maintenance, Blindspot, Otherhood, Sully, Pay it Forward, The Intern, and The Black List. Bernard can currently be seen in the feature film Hit Man, written and directed by Richard Linklater.

Becca Blackwell has collaborated with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Erin Markey, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf, Lisa D'Amour, and more. Film and television credits include High Maintenance, Ramy, Marriage Story, Shameless, Deadman's Barstool, Jack in the Box, If Found, Sort Of, She’s Clean, You Can’t Stay Here, BROS, and Survival of the Thickest. Their solo shows, They, Themself and Schmerm and Schmermie's Choice, have toured across the US. Blackwell was a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, the Franklin Furnace Award, and the Creative Capital Award. They recently made their Broadway debut in Is This a Room and have a new one-person show, Back to She.

Zach Grenier received a Tony nomination for Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations for his performance as Ludwig van Beethoven. He’s known on television for portraying David Lee on CBS’s The Good Wife and its spin-off on Paramount+ The Good Fight, Mayor Feratti on Ray Donovan, and Kenton on Hulu’s Devs. Additional credits include the films She Said, Fight Club, Zodiac, Ride with the Devil, and the television series Law & Order, Deadwood, Touching Evil, and 24. His favorite stage role is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which he played at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

Lulu Miller is a Peabody award–winning science journalist, co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios podcast Radiolab, and host of the kids’ podcast Terrestrials. Her career in radio started as a producer for Radiolab, and she is the co-founder of the NPR show Invisibilia. She is also the author of the bestselling book Why Fish Don’t Exist.

Latif Nasser is co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios show Radiolab and host and executive producer of the Emmy-nominated Netflix science series Connected.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade. Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Atwood’s latest short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, was published in 2023.

Brian Doyle (1956 – 2017) was an award-winning author who served as the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon from 1991 to 2017. Doyle wrote many books of fiction, essays, and poems, including A Book of Uncommon Prayer, which was named “A Best Spiritual Book of the Year” by Spirituality & Practice. His novels include Mink River, The Plover, Chicago, and Martin Marten, for which he won a 2016 Oregon Book Award for Young Adult Literature. Additional honors include a number of book awards from the Catholic Press Association, the Christopher Medal, three Pushcart Prizes, the University of Notre Dame’s Griffin Award in literature, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Foreword Review's Novel of the Year award, the John Burroughs Award for Nature Essays, and the 2017 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing for his novel Martin Marten, only the second work of fiction to be awarded the Medal in its 90-year history.

Randa Jarrar is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and actor. Her books include the novel, A Map of Home, the collection of stories, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, and the memoirs Love Is An Ex-Country and You Are A Teen Mom: Instructions. She lives in Los Angeles.

Miranda July is the author of the short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the nonfiction collection It Chooses You, and the novel The First Bad Man. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. July directed and starred in the films The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and Kajillionaire. July’s videos, performances, web-based projects, and sculptures have been presented at MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. July’s latest novel, All Fours, will be published in May.

Don Shea’s (__- 2020) stories appeared in The North American Review, StoryQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, The Utne Reader, Other Voices, Stirring, The Quarterly, Quick Fiction, and numerous other magazines. He was included in the Norton anthologies Flash Fiction and Flash Fiction Forward, the Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus, the Doubleday anthology Quickly Aging Here, and in Best of Crosscurrents. His stories also appeared in the teaching texts Reasoning and Writing Well and Fast Fiction. His story collection, Injuries and Damages, was shortlisted for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Shea taught writing workshops at The Writer’s Voice, the West Side YMCA, and The New School, and he was a writing tutor at Bard High School/Early College, a New York City public school for gifted kids.