Pascale Armand starred on Broadway in Eclipsed, for which she received a Tony nomination, and The Trip to Bountiful with the late Ms. Cicely Tyson. Additional stage credits include Love's Labor's Lost, Hamlet, A Raisin in the Sun, The Piano Lesson, Jitney, Gem of the Ocean, Ruined, The Convert, for which she received the 2012 Los Angeles Ovation Award for Best Leading Actress, Belleville, An Octoroon, and Relevance. Her screen credits include Chicago Med, Prodigal Son, The Blacklist, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Armand is an alumna of NYU's Graduate Acting Program, core member of Quick Silver Theater, and creator of her one-woman show, $#!thole Country Clapback.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam, and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, Atwood was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor for services to literature.
Carrie Coon currently stars on HBO’s The Gilded Age. She is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has performed in Mary Page Marlowe, Three Sisters, The March, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which also ran on Broadway, earning Coon a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress and a Theatre World Award. Her film and television credits include Gone Girl, The Post, Widows, Avengers: Infinity War, The Nest, Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The Sinner, The Leftovers (Critics’ Choice Television Award), and Fargo. Coon received the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama for her performances in The Leftovers and Fargo.
Mona Eltahawy is the founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter Feminist Giant. Her first book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa, and her second, The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls, took her disruption worldwide. Eltahawy’s commentary has appeared in media around the world.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. In the early 1890s, she began publishing poems and stories, including “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and became a lecturer on labor, feminism, reform, and suffrage. In 1898, she published Women and Economics, a call for financial independence for women. From 1909 to 1916 she wrote, edited, and published the monthly magazine The Forerunner, in which she published most of her work from then on, including What Diantha Did, The Man-Made World, Moving the Mountain, and both Herland and With Her in Ourland. With Jane Addams she founded the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915.
Ann Harada is best known for playing Christmas Eve in the Broadway and London productions of Avenue Q and stepsister Charlotte in Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Additional Broadway credits include 9 to 5, the revival of Les Misérables, Seussical, and M. Butterfly. Film and television credits include Sisters, Admission, Hope Springs, The Art of Getting By, Feel, The Jim Gaffigan Show, Happiness, Smash, Lipstick Jungle, 30 Rock, Blue Bloods, The Flight Attendant, and Schmigadoon!. Upcoming films include Disenchanted and Jerry and Marge Go Large.
Shanteka Sigers is a graduate of Northwestern University and New York University’s MFA Writers Workshop in Paris. She has published several stories in the Chicago Reader’s Pure Fiction issue. Her story, “A Way with Bea,” has appeared in the Paris Review and the 2021 Best American Short Stories. She was listed by Business Insider as one of the Top Creative Women in Advertising and twice named among Black Enterprise’s Top Women in Marketing and Advertising. Currently, she works at Meta as a Director for Creative Shop.
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
“Unpopular Gals” by Margaret Atwood, from Good Bones and Simple Murders (Nan A. Talese, November 2001). Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of Margaret Atwood © O W Toad, 2017.
“A Way with Bea” by Shanteka Sigers, from The Best American Short Stories 2021 (Mariner, October 2021). First published in The Paris Review. Copyright © 2020 by Shanteka Sigers. Used by permission of the author.
“The Yellow WallPaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. First published in The New England Magazine. In the public domain.
