First, a lifetime goes by in minutes in Kelly Cherry’s “The Parents,” read by Kaneza Schaal. A father and son grieve differently after the death of a wife and mother in our second story, Tom Barbash’s “The Women,” read by Michael Imperioli. In our last story, Annie Proulx’s “The Garlic War,” it’s a battle of wills in the kitchen voiced by reader Shohreh Aghdashloo.
First, a lifetime goes by in minutes in Kelly Cherry’s “The Parents,” read by Kaneza Schaal.
Kelly Cherry is the author of over twenty volumes of prose, poetry, and nonfiction and is the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. She has been honored with the Hanes Poetry Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize, in addition to receiving fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and Yaddo.
Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based theatre artist. She has worked on stage with Elevator Repair Service, The Wooster Group, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Jay Scheib, Claude Wampler, and New York City Opera. This work brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, BAM, and MoMA. On camera she has worked with Kathryn Bigelow, Marya Cohn, Josephine Decker, Chelsea Knight and the “Law & Order” team. Schaal directed “Go Forth,” which premiered in Performance Space 122’s COIL Festival, and is currently at work on “Jack & Jill,” a multimedia performance piece she created in collaboration with Cornell Alston.
A father and son grieve differently after the death of a wife and mother in our second story, Tom Barbash’s “The Women,” read by Michael Imperioli.
Barbash grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (on the Balloon block). He is the author of the New York Times bestselling nonfiction book On Top of the World, the short story collection Stay Up With Me, and the novel The Last Good Chance, winner of the California Book Award and a Publishers Weekly book of the year. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Barbash currently teaches in MFA programs at the California College of the Arts and Pacific Lutheran University.
Michael Imperioli is best known for his role on “The Sopranos,” for which he won an Emmy Award. Additional television credits include “Californication,” “Lucifer,” “Law & Order,” “Life on Mars,” and “Blue Bloods,” among other programs. His film appearances include “Goodfellas,” “Jungle Fever,” “Bad Boys,” “The Basketball Diaries,” “Lean on Me,” and “Summer of Sam,” which he co-wrote and co-produced. In 2008, He wrote and directed his first feature film, “The Hungry Ghosts.” He’s currently starring in the television series “Alex, Inc.”, and his novel The Perfume Burned His Eyes was published in April 2018.
In our last story, Annie Proulx’s “The Garlic War,” it’s a battle of wills in the kitchen.
Proulx is the author of novels Postcards, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Shipping News, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Barkskins, as well as the short story collections Heart Songs and Other Stories, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is. Her short story “Brokeback Mountain” was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film.
Reader Shohreh Aghdashloo is an Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award–winning actress who began her career in her native Iran. American audiences know her best from her Oscar-nominated performance in “House of Sand and Fog,” her Emmy-winning role in “House of Saddam,” and as the terrorist and mother Dina Araz in “24.” Most recently she has appeared in the futuristic TV series “The Expanse.”
