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Selected Shorts
Host Meg Wolitzer presents three works that explore the complicated lives of women. Edwidge Danticat’s essay “Women Like Us” honors the long line of strong women in her family, but also recognizes her need to distance herself in order to become a writer. The reader is the late Lynne Thigpen. In an excerpt from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, performed by Joan Allen, a philandering husband gets just what he deserves. And an order of nuns has hidden strengths—and comic timing—in Claire Luchette’s “New Bees,” performed by Joanna Gleason.
Joan Allen began her New York career off-Broadway in a production of And a Nightingale Sang. Her Broadway credits include Burn This, for which she received a Tony Award for Best Actress, The Heidi Chronicles, Impressionism, and most recently, The Waverly Gallery. She is an original member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has appeared in more than 25 productions, including Balm in Gilead and The Wheel. Allen is a three-time Academy Award nominee, receiving Best Supporting Actress nominations forNixon andThe Crucible, and a Best Actress nomination forThe Contender. Additional film credits include Pleasantville, Face/Off, The Notebook, The Ice Storm, The Upside of Anger, The Bourne Identity series, and Room. On television, she is known for her portrayal of Georgia O’Keefe in the 2009 biopic of the same name, and she has had recurring roles in Luck, The Killing, The Family, and the recent Apple TV+ miniseries Lisey’s Story.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, Claire of the Sea Light, and The Dew Breaker. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and a 2020 winner of the Vilceck Prize. Her most recent work, the story collection Everything Inside, is a 2020 winner of the Bocas Fiction Prize, the Story Prize, and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) was the author of six essay collections, including I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, a New York Times bestseller; I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections; and the novel Heartburn. She received Academy Award nominations for best original screenplay for When Harry Met Sally..., Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed. Additional films include You’ve Got Mail and Julie & Julia, and the plays Love, Loss, and What I Wore, with Delia Ephron, and Lucky Guy, for which she received a posthumous Tony Award nomination.
Joanna Gleason is a Tony Award-winning actress best known for her roles on Broadway in I Love My Wife, Joe Egg, Into the Woods, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Her extensive film and television career includes Heartburn, Boogie Nights, Hannah and Her Sisters, Sex and the City, The West Wing, Tracey Ullman, Friends, Blue Bloods, The Affair, Sensitive Skin, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and The Bite. Gleason has received the New England Theatre Conference with a Special Award for Achievement in Theatre, the Rockefeller Award from SUNY Purchase for Artistic Achievement, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Occidental College. She is currently in post production for the feature film The Grotto, which she wrote and directed.
Claire Luchette’s work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, and Granta. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Luchette graduated from the University of Oregon MFA program and has received grants and scholarships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Lighthouse Works, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the James Merrill House. Agatha of Little Neon is Luchette’s first novel. They are the 2022-3 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the NYPL's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Lynne Thigpen (1948 - 2003) was known for her roles as The Chief in Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Luna in Bear in the Big Blue House. On Broadway, she performed in An American Daughter, for which she received a Tony Award, Fences, Tintypes, A Month of Sundays, Working, and The Magic Show. Additional films and television credits include Godspell, Thirtysomething, Bob Roberts, The Paper, Lean on Me, Homicide: Life on the Street: Tootsie, The Insider, The District, and Anger Management.
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
"Women Like Us" by Edwidge Danticat. Copyright © 1995 by Edwidge Danticat. From Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat. Used by permission of Soho Press.
An excerpt from Heartburn by Nora Ephron (Knopf, 1983). Copyright © 1983 by Nora Ephron. Used by permission of ICM Partners.
“New Bees” by Claire Luchette, published in Ploughshares (Winter 2017-18). Copyright © 2018 by Claire Luchette. Used by permission of The Book Group.
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