Coming of Age

Donna Lynne Champlin, best known as Paula Proctor on the Emmy award-winning Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is an OBIE, Drama Desk, and Gracie Award-winning actress. Additional film and television credits include Feel The Beat; Law & Order; The Blacklist; Submissions Only; The Good Wife; Birdman; Younger; Downsizing; Another Period; Yes, God, Yes;. Champlin has appeared on Broadway in James Joyce’s The Dead, By Jeeves, Hollywood Arms, Sweeney Todd, and Billy Elliot: The Musical, and off-Broadway in My Life with Albertine, First Lady Suite, Flight of the Lawnchair Man, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, As You Like It, Working and The Taming of the Shrew. Champlin can be heard on the podcast series In Strange Woods and Disney’s Star Vs. the Forces of Evil, and seen on and The First Lady.

Katrina Dodson is the translator of Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories, which was awarded the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, the American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Prize, and a Northern California Book Award. Her translation of Mário de Andrade’s 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character, will be published in 2023. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Granta, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and she has written for Guernica and McSweeney’s. She has taught translation at Mills College and the University of Iowa, and currently at Columbia University. Dodson is also an affiliated scholar of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University.

Julia Elliott’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, The New York Times, and other publications. She was honored with a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and The Best American Short Stories. Her debut story collection, The Wilds, was chosen by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Book Riot, and Electric Literature as one of the Best Books of 2014, and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her debut novel, The New and Improved Ronnie Futch, was published in 2015.

Tayari Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage, a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection, winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. Her additional titles include Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo. She has been awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the NAACP Image Award, among other honors. Jones serves as Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. In 2019, she was appointed an A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University.

Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977) was one of Brazil’s foremost modern writers, earning international acclaim for her novels and short stories. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was awarded the 1944 Graça Aranha national prize for fiction, and her following works, including the short story collection Family Ties and the novels The Passion According to G.H. and Água Viva, were similarly lauded. Interest in Lispector’s work was revived in 2009 with the publication of Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. The translated collection The Complete Stories was published by New Directions and won the PEN Translation Prize in 2016.

Pepe Nufrio appeared in the 50th Anniversary national tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. He is a graduate of The New School and has studied at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Past credits include Broadway Rising Stars and Broadway Unplugged at Town Hall; The Great Broadway Belt Show; Great Singers, Great Songs at Feinstein’s/54 Below; and regional productions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, Evita, Grease, and Into the Woods, among others. Nufrio can be seen on the television series Sequía.

CREDITS

“The First Kiss” by Clarice Lispector, translation by Katrina Dodson, from Complete Stories, copyright ©1951, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1978, 2010, 2015 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector, translation copyright © 2015 by Katrina Dodson. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

“Hellion” by Julia Elliott. Copyright © 2018 by Julia Elliott. First published in The Georgia Review, edited by the author. Performed with permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc., and the author.