Come Out Swinging

Jenny Allen is a writer and performer whose works include the fable collection The Long Chalkboard and, most recently, Would Everybody Please Stop?, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She wrote and starred in the award-winning one-woman show I Got Sick Then I Got Better. Allen’s writing has been featured in several anthologies, including Disquiet, Please!: More Humor Writing from the New Yorker and The 50 Funniest American Writers, edited by Andy Borowitz.

Crystal Dickinson recently starred in The Blood Quilt and Broke-ology at Lincoln Center. She won the Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut in the 2012 production of Clybourne Park and subsequently appeared in You Can’t Take It With You on Broadway in 2014. Her additional theater credits include A Raisin in the Sun, Seven Guitars, Wine in the Wilderness, and Gem of the Ocean at Two River Theater, Lessons in Survival at the Vineyard, The Low Road and Cullud Wattah at The Public, Covenant at the Roundabout, The Trees at Playwright’s Horizons, and Blues for an Alabama Sky at the McCarter. Her film and television credits include The Accidental Wolf, I Origins, The Good Wife, Feed the Beast, New Amsterdam, and recurring roles on The CHI and For Life. Dickinson has taught at Stella Adler Studio, Spelman College, Pace University, Princeton University, the Juilliard School, NYU, University of Illinois, and Seton Hall.

Peter Grosz is a writer and actor whose credits include The Colbert Report, for which he earned two Emmy Awards, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Vinyl, Rough Night, The President Show, Veep, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, At Home with Amy Sedaris, Search Party, The Menu, Who Invited Charlie, Fleishman Is in Trouble, New Amsterdam, White House Plumbers, Elsbeth, and Catherine & Michael, which he also wrote and produced. In 2023, Grosz appeared on Broadway in Good Night, Oscar. Additionally, he is a regular panelist on Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!

Jade Jones is a writer and educator. A former Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, she holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A winner of the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, and Electric Literature. She lives in New Jersey, where she is the Director of Operations at Tailored Tutoring LLC. Her debut novel, Darlene, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Katherine Heiny is the author of Early Morning Riser; Standard Deviation; and Single, Carefree, Mellow, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other magazines. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and children, and is a former resident of London, The Hague, and Boyne City, Michigan.

Alysia Reiner is best known for her role as Fig on seven seasons of Orange Is the New Black, for which she received a SAG Award, and for originating Agent Sadie Deever in the 2023 Emmy and Critics Choice Award–winning Ms. Marvel. Additional recent television credits includes five seasons as Sunny on the Peabody Award–winning Better Things on FX and HULU, two seasons as Kiki on HBO’s The Deuce, two seasons as Kathryn in Sharon Horgan’s Shining Vale on HBO, and Season Two of Netflix’s The Diplomat, which is streaming now, Marshmallow, Ramona at Midlife, O Horizon, Going Places, The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, and additional highlights include the Oscar-winning film Sideways, Broad City, and going head-to-head with Viola Davis in How to Get Away with Murder. Alysia has performed on stages from The Royal Court Theatre in London to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem NYC, to the Edinburgh Festival, where she won a Critics Choice Award. Select New York theater credits include An Oak Tree with Tim Crouch, which received a special Obie Award, My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre at The Public, Jesus in Manhattan with the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Pentecost with the Barrow Group

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel.

CREDITS

“In the Car,” by Jenny Allen, commissioned by Symphony Space. Copyright © 2020 by Jenny Allen. Used by permission of the author.

“Your Aunt Think She Ramona Africa,” by Jade Jones. Excerpted from the forthcoming novel Darlene, by Jade Jones, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Used by permission of the author.

“CobRa,” by Katherine Heiny, from Games and Rituals (Knopf, 2023). First published in Grand Journal. Copyright © 2023 by Katherine Heiny. Adapted version of the text used by permission of the author.