Stockard Channing is known for her roles across film, television, and theater, appearing in Grease, The West Wing, for which she earned an Emmy Award, and Six Degrees of Separation, first on Broadway and then in its film adaptation, earning her Tony, Golden Globe, and Academy Award nominations. Channing has appeared on Broadway in The Little Foxes, The Lion in Winter, Pal Joey, Other Desert Cities, and It’s Only a Play. Additional screen credits include Practical Magic, The Mysteries of Laura, The Good Wife, Knuckles, Julia, Difficult People, The Guest Book, The Matthew Shepard Story, for which she won an Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, Angry Neighbors, and Maryland. Upcoming projects include Practical Magic 2.
Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers, Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award for fiction, and Chimerica: A Novel. She is the editor of Alta Journal's California Book Club and served as Fiction Committee Chair for the National Book Critics Circle for 2022. Her short stories have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Alta, Air/Light, Midnight Breakfast, The Normal School, and Joyland. A finalist for an Los Angeles Press Club National Arts and Entertainment awards, she has contributed essays and reviews to TheWashington Post, Slate, Los Angeles Times, TheNew York Times (Modern Love), San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized by the Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards and the Los Angeles Press Club National A&E Awards.
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including her most recent novels Hum and The Need, which was a nominee for the 2019 National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her work has appeared in TheNew Yorker, The Atlantic, and TheNew York Times. Phillips is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.
Kirsten Vangsness is best known for playing the bespectacled tech kitten Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds, which is on its 18th season for Paramount+ and as Bigelow McFigglehorn on the new Wizards Beyond Waverly Place on Disney. Kirsten has just penned her third solo piece, Outdated, which will be opening early 2025, and she is the host of BITS, a monthly performance salon in Hollywood. She LOVES reading for Selected Shorts.
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
“The Knowers” from Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips. Copyright © 2016 by Helen Phillips. Used by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All Rights Reserved.
“Time Invents Us” by Anita Felicelli. Originally appeared in Alta (Fall 2020/Issue 13). Copyright © 2020 by Anita Felicelli. Used by permission of the author.
