A Simple Solution

T.C. Boyle is the author of 31 books of fiction, including the novels World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award; Drop City, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award; The Terranauts; and the short story collections Greasy Lake and Other Stories, After the Plague, T.C. Boyle Stories, T.C. Boyle Stories II, The Relive Box and Other Stories, most recently, Blue Skies and I Walk Between the Raindrops. His works have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta, and The Paris Review, among other publications. Boyle won the PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2014.

Philip Estrera is a NYC–based actor whose theater credits include Discus and Bottling Dreams with Hunger & Thirst Theatre,Orphan of Zhao at La Jolla Playhouse, Love with Art House Productions, Twelfth Night with Shakespeare NJ, Uncle Vanya with the Columbia University School of the Arts, and Monstress at the American Conservatory Theater, which he helped to develop and features all original bluegrass music. Estrera appeared in the Sesame Street Thanksgiving special as Anton the bus driver, which introduced the first Asian American puppet to the series. He can be seen in episodes of Blue Bloods and New Amsterdam. Estrera is a graduate of the American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program.

Matthew Ryan Frankel lives in Baltimore, Maryland. He would like to acknowledge his friends, his former teachers, and the staff of Enoch Pratt Central Library for their support, as well as the writers whose influence shaped his writing: Jean Genet, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburo Oë. His current projects include several short stories, a novel, and a philosophical work on radical freedom. “Carapace” is dedicated to his grandfather Khye Weng Ng and was the winner of the 2023 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.

Renée Elise Goldsberry is a multi-hyphenate actress and singer, best known for originating the role of Angelica Schuyler in the groundbreaking Broadway musical Hamilton, for which she won Tony and Grammy Awards and received an Emmy Award nomination for the Disney+ filmed version. Onscreen, Goldsberry most recently starred in the critically acclaimed comedy series Girls5eva, for which she earned multiple Critics Choice and Television Critic Association Award nominations for her breakthrough role as Wickie Roy. For film, she next co-stars in Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated feature A House of Dynamite. Her past screen credits include the title role in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks starring Oprah Winfrey; memorable supporting performances in Marvel’s She-Hulk and Netflix’s Altered Carbon; a recurring role on CBS’s The Good Wife; a key supporting turn opposite Sterling K. Brown, Taylor Russell, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. in the lauded indie feature Waves; a leading role in the independent feature Albany Road; and two Daytime Emmy nominations for her fan-favorite performance as Evangeline Williamson on the daytime drama One Life to Live, for which she was also nominated for two NAACP Image Awards. A stage veteran, she will return to Broadway in Spring 2026 in the new play The Balusters, written by Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire. Her previous Broadway credits include the musicals The Color Purple, Rent, and The Lion King, and the plays Good People and All In: Comedy About Love. Her recently released debut album of original music, Who I Really Am, is available now on all streaming platforms.

Zach Grenier 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. Other television series include 24, FBI, and Law & Order. His favorite stage role is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which he played at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

Meron Hadero was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child after living briefly in Germany. She graduated from Princeton and Yale Law School before receiving an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her stories have appeared in, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, Boulevard,The Offing, The Normal School, the anthology Addis Ababa Noir, and the 2021 edition of Best American Short Stories. Hadero is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Meron appeared in San Francisco Magazine’s 2018 feature “Making Waves: 100 Artists Putting the East Bay on the Map” and in Deutsche Welle’s year-end feature “Africa in 2021” for her short stories. In 2022, she published her debut short story collection titled A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, for which she was awarded the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. She was also the first Ethiopian-born winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing (2021).

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.

CREDITS

“Top of the Food Chain” by T.C. Boyle, from T.C. Boyle Stories (Viking, 1998). First appeared in Harper’s (April 1993). Copyright © 1993 by T.C. Boyle. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc.

“The Suitcase” by Meron Hadero. First published in the Missouri Review, vol 38, no. 3, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Meron Hadero. Used by permission of the author.

“Carapace,” by Matthew Ryan Frankel. Winner of the 2023 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize and published in Electric Literature (May 31, 2023). Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Ryan Frankel. Used by permission of the author.