Escalation

ACTORS & ARTISTS

Eboni Booth is a writer and actress from New York City, where she is currently a Playwriting Fellow at Juilliard. In 2020, her play Paris debuted off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company. Additional works include Dance Nation, One or Two, A Small World, and Crazy Annie. As an actress, she has appeared in productions at Playwrights Horizons, LCT3/Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Club, Page 73, Soho Rep., Atlantic Theater Company, and more. Her television credits include The Good Fight, The Americans, Instinct, Show Me a Hero, Daredevil, and The Punisher. Booth is a member of the WP Lab, an alum of Clubbed Thumb’s Emerging Writers Group, and a graduate of the University of Vermont.

Lilli Cooper is recognized for her leading roles on Broadway in SpongeBob SquarePants and Tootsie, for which she was honored with a Tony nomination. Additional Broadway credits include Spring Awakening and Wicked, and Tick, Tick...Boom! and Sundown, Yellow Moon off-Broadway. Cooper has appeared on film and television in Bull, Instinct, Elementary, The Code, The Good Fight, Indoor Boys, Dynasty, and The Post.

Hope Davis has appeared in the films About Schmidt; American Splendor; Synecdoche, New York; Captain America: Civil War; and Rebel in the Rye, among others. On television, Davis’s credits include In Treatment, The Newsroom, The Special Relationship, Allegiance, American Crime, and Wayward Pines, and recent recurring roles in the series For the People and Strange Angel. Her theater credits include Ivanov, Two Shakespearean Actors, Spinning Into Butter, Food Chain, Measure for Measure, God of Carnage, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award, and The Red Barn. She will appear in the forthcoming film The Rock Pile and the forthcoming miniseries Your Honor.

Julie Halston is known as a “Legend of Off-Broadway” in honor of her extensive career on stage. A founding member of Charles Busch’s company Theatre-in-Limbo, she has performed alongside Busch in numerous productions, including The Divine Sister, Red Scare on Sunset, The Tribute Artist, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Halston’s Broadway credits include Gypsy, Hairspray, Anything Goes, On the Town, You Can’t Take It with You, for which she was awarded the Richard Seff Award, and most recently, Tootsie. She has been featured on television in The Class, Sex and the City, Difficult People, Crisis in Six Scenes, Theater Talk, Divorce, and Almost Family.

Shirley Jackson (1916 - 1965) was an American author whose works include the novels The Road Through the Wall, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the short story collections The Lottery and Other Stories and Dark Tales. Her stories have been widely anthologized and featured in The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories, and she was twice awarded the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story. The Haunting of Hill House was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been made into two feature films, a play, and most recently, a television series on Netflix. The Shirley Jackson Award was established in 2007 to honor outstanding achievement in the genres of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and memoirist. She is the author the poetry collections Viper Rum and Tropic of Squalor, which was longlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the memoirs Cherry, Lit, and The Liars’ Club, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and the nonfiction work The Art of Memoir. Karr is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Whiting Award, the Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry magazine. Karr currently teaches at Syracuse University.

Shalewa Sharpe is a stand-up comedian. She has been featured on 2 Dope Queens and The New Negroes and has performed live at numerous shows, venues, and festivals, including Night Train with Wyatt Cenac, The Knitting Factory, Creek and Cave, RiotLA, the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, and Comedy Exposition, among others. Sharpe was recently featured on John Cameron Mitchell’s musical podcast Anthem: Homunculus. Her debut comedy album, Stay Eating Cookies, was released in 2016, and her second comedy album, So You Just Out Here?, was released last year.

Ethan Slater made his Broadway debut as Spongebob in SpongeBob SquarePants, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award and won Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Theatre World, and Broadway Beacon awards. He has appeared on television in Law & Order: SVU, Instinct, Murphy Brown, and Fosse/Verdon. As a writer, Slater has a number of projects in development, including the film Write Me In and the musical Edge of the World.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, The Feminist Wire, McSweeney’s podcast The Organist, The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, and The White Review, among other publications. Her writing has received support from Callaloo, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her debut collection, Heads of the Colored People, was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize; was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction; and has won the PEN Open Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and an Audie Award. The title story won StoryQuarterly’s 2016 Fiction Prize. Thompson-Spires is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award.