Generation Gap

Kathryn Chetkovich is the author of the short story collection Friendly Fire, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the play Acts of Love. Her work has appeared in Granta, Threepenny Review, New England Review, Mississippi Review, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, and The Best American Short Stories 1998, among other publications. Her essay “Envy” was featured in The Best American Essays 2004. She works as a freelance editor.

Colman Domingo is an award-winning actor, playwright, director, and producer. He produced and starred in the independent film Sing Sing, which earned numerous awards and two Academy Award nominations. In 2023, Domingo was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Production of a Play for the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fat Ham on Broadway. He won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama, a Hollywood Critics Association Award for Best Actor in a Limited Series/Anthology, and an Imagen Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his role as Ali in the HBO series Euphoria. Additional credits include Dead Man’s Wire, The Four Seasons, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Color Purple, The Madness, Rustin, for which he also received an Academy Award nomination, The Color Purple, Lincoln, The Butler, Selma, Candyman, and Zola. As a writer, his plays and musicals include Dot, Wild with Happy, and A Boy and His Soul, the Tony Award–nominated Broadway musical Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, and the musical Light's Out: Nat King Cole. Domingo received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Ursinus College. He is on the faculty of University of Southern California, School of Dramatic Arts as a Professor of Acting, after having served as a Juilliard School Creative Associate and a faculty member of the Yale School of Drama.

Tavi Gevinson is a writer, actress, and the founder of Rookie, an online magazine for teenagers. She has appeared on stage in Broadway productions of This Is Our Youth, The Crucible, and The Cherry Orchard, and in off-Broadway productions of Pre-existing Condition, written and directed by Selected Shorts regular Marin Ireland, Days of Rage, Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow, Assassins, and The Good John Proctor. In 2024 she co-starred in, co-wrote, and co-directed a scripted podcast based on the Edith Wharton book Glimpses of the Moon. On screen she has appeared in the films Shortcomings, Enough Said, Person to Person, and Halston, and the television series American Horror Story: Delicate, Scream Queens, The Twilight Zone, and Gossip Girl. Gevinson’s writing has been featured in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Cut, and New York, among other publications. She recently published the zine Fan Fiction.

Kyle McCarthy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Additionally, McCarthy is the recipient of the Edgar Eager Memorial Fund Prize, Cyrilly Abels Short Story Prize, and the Louis Begley Award. Her critical essays have appeared in Electric Literature and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Southwest Review, the Harvard Review, and American Short Fiction, among other publications. Her debut novel, Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, was published in 2020. Her new novel, Immersions, will be published on May 5, 2026.

Phillipa Soo is best known for originating the role of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton in Hamilton. The role garnered her the Lucille Lortel Award in 2015 for Lead Actress in a Musical during the show’s pre-broadway, sold-out run at The Public Theater as well as a 2016 Tony Award nomination. Additional stage credits include leading roles in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 off-Broadway and Amélie, The Parisian Woman, and Camelot on Broadway. On screen, she has appeared in Smash, Here and Now, The Code, The Broken Hearts Gallery, Gumshoe, The Bite, Dopesick, Shining Girls, Blue’s Big City Adventure, and One True Loves. In 2025 she played the role of Mary Magdalene in the Hollywood Bowl production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and she currently stars on the ABC series Doctor Odyssey.

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and adapted into a feature film. His second novel, Blackouts, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Southern California Book Award. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. Torres teaches at UCLA.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. The Interestings is currently being adapted as a musical, with a book by Sarah Ruhl and music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017 and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.

CREDITS

“Trash Kites” by Justin Torres. Copyright 2011 © by Justin Torres. Collected in We the Animals by Justin Torres. Used by permission of the author.

“The World with My Mother Still in It” by Kathryn Chetkovich, from The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-2000 (University of Iowa Press, 2001). First appeared in Threepenny Review (Summer 1998) and previously collected in Friendly Fire (University of Iowa Press, 1998). Copyright © 1998 by Kathryn Chetkovich. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.

“Ancient Rome” by Kyle McCarthy. First published in the American Short Fiction, vol 19, issue 62, summer 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Kyle McCarthy. Used by permission of the author.