Coming and Going

James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was a writer and civil rights activist. He wrote more than a dozen novels and essay collections, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Though he expatriated to Paris in 1948, Baldwin’s work deals primarily with the social and cultural issues of being black and homosexual in America before and during the civil rights movement. His unfinished work, Remember This House, was adapted into the award-winning documentary I Am Not Your Negro in 2016, and a film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk was released in 2018. Today his legacy lives on through the National James Baldwin Literary Society and the James Baldwin Scholars program at Hampshire College.

Stephen Colbert currently hosts the Emmy-nominated #1 show in late night The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He previously hosted The Colbert Report, following his work as a correspondent on The Daily Show. The Colbert Report received two Peabody Awards, two Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards, and thirty-seven total Emmy nominations. Colbert has also authored five books, the most recent of which, Whose Boat Is This Boat?, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. All proceeds from the book benefited the victims of Hurricane Florence and Michael, and most recently, COVID-19 relief.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940), American short-story writer and novelist, is known for his depictions of the Jazz Age. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920, and gained him entry to literary magazines such as Scribner’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Among his other well-known works are Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, and The Last Tycoon.

Nathan Hinton began his professional career at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and has played major and supporting roles with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC; Pittsburgh Public Theater; Actors Theatre of Louisville; Triad Stage; Berkeley Rep; Dallas Theatre Center; the Huntington; Rattlestick Playwrights Theater; and The Working Theater. He was a member of the first national touring company of Angels in America and won the Barrymore Award for Excellence in Theatre as part of the ensemble of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out with the Philadelphia Theatre Company. His film and television credits include Madam Secretary, Manifest, The Code, FBI: Most Wanted, and Walking Home: A Survival Guide. Hinton is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Bhavesh Patel most recently appeared on Broadway in The Nap at MTC and Present Laughter, opposite Kevin Kline. Additional theater credits include War Horse and Hayden's Seven Last Words at Lincoln Center, Indian Ink at Roundabout, and A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Public's Shakespeare in the Park. Additionally, he has appeared at Second Stage, Classic Stage Company, Red Bull Theater, and the New York Theatre Workshop. His television and film credits include Chicago PD, Law & Order SVU, New Amsterdam, Little America, Bull, The Blacklist, Jon Glazer Loves Gear, Madame Secretary, Mysteries of Laura, The Good Wife, The Sound of Silence, Gold, Wilding, Two Days in New York, James White, Maiden Heist,The Weekend, and You Should Have the Body.

Leonardo Sciascia (1921 – 1989) A member of European Parliament and the Palermo city council, Sciascia wrote essays and political investigative journalism, in addition to a series of novels, including Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) and A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own), and the story collection Il mare colore del vino (The Wine-Dark Sea).

Sarah Steele currently stars on CBS's The Good Fight. She has appeared in numerous films, television shows, on Broadway and off. She won an Independent Spirit Award for her ensemble work in Nicole Holofcener's Please Give and a Drama Desk for her ensemble work in Stephen Karam's The Humans. Steele graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature and sometimes makes weird dances on Instagram.

John Turturro is an actor and director whose notable film credits include Do the Right Thing; Barton Fink; Quiz Show; The Big Lebowski; The Truce; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; and Mia Madre. He is the director of six films, including Mac, which was honored with the Caméra d’Or at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, and most recently, The Jesus Rolls. On stage, he has appeared in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, for which was awarded an Obie, Italian-American Reconciliation, La Puta Vida, The Bald Soprano, Steel on Steel, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, End Game, and The Cherry Orchard. Turturro is also known for his television roles on Monk, for which he won an Emmy, The Night Of, The Bronx Is Burning, and The Name of the Rose, The Plot Against America, The Batman, and Severance. Upcoming projects include Bless Me Father, Can't Go Home, and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was one of the grandmasters of modern American letters. Called by TheNew York Times "the counterculture's novelist," his works guided a generation through the miasma of war and greed that was life in the US in the second half of the twentieth century. Vonnegut rose to prominence with the publication of Cat's Cradle in 1963. Several modern classics, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; and Breakfast of Champions soon followed. Vonnegut’s letters, essays, and short stories have been anthologized in dozens of collections, including A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, and Complete Stories.

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. She is excited to be the new host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts.

CREDITS

"City" by Kurt Vonnegut, currently collected in COMPLETE STORIES. Copyright © 2017 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

An excerpt from Another Country, collected in James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (Library of America, 1998). First appeared in Another Country (Dial Press, 1956). Copyright © 1956 by James Baldwin.

“The Long Voyage” (“Il lungo viaggio”) from Il mare colore del vino (Adelphi, 2011). Copyright © Estate of Leonardo Sciascia. Used by arrangement with The Italian Literary Agency. Translation copyright © 2019 Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.

"Three Hours Between Planes" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Out of copyright.