Joan Didion (1934 - 2021) is the author of ten acclaimed books of nonfiction: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, Where I Was From, The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights, and South and West: From a Notebook. She is also the author of the novels Run, River; Play It As It Lays; A Book of Common Prayer; Democracy; and The Last Thing He Wanted. Didion is also the author of several screenplays, including A Star is Born and Up Close & Personal, and adapted her Pulitzer Prize-winning work The Year of Magical Thinking into a play. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published in 2006. Didion has received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Evelyn F. Burkey Award from the Writers Guild of America, an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University, and the National Medal of the Arts, among other honors.
Mia Dillon is a Tony-nominated stage actress whose Broadway credits include Our Town, The Miser, The Corn Is Green, Hay Fever, Agnes of God, Crimes of the Heart, and Da. She has worked extensively off-Broadway and regionally from San Diego to Dublin, and her work has been honored with the CT Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk nomination, the Clarence Derwent Award, a Dramalogue Award, among others. Film and TV appearances include all three Law & Orders, Brain Dead, The Jury, Mary and Rhoda, Gods and Generals, The Money Pit, Ordinary World, All Good Things, and Never Rarely Sometimes. Upcoming projects include Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Jill Eikenberry starred in the Broadway productions of Moonchildren, Watch on the Rhine, Summer Brave, Onward Victoria, and All Over Town. Off-Broadway, she won an Obie Award for her performances in Lemon Sky and Life Under Water, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for The Kid. She earned a Golden Globe Award and five Emmy nominations as Ann Kelsey on NBC’s L.A. Law, and received the Humanitas Prize for Destined to Live, a breast cancer documentary she co-produced and hosted on NBC. Her film credits include Arthur, Something Borrowed, Young Adult, Keep in Touch, and In Reality. Television work includes guest roles on Law & Order and Body of Proof. Eikenberry has appeared alongside her husband, Michael Tucker, in Tucker’s play The M Spot, off-Broadway in Wallace Shawn’s latest work, Evening at the Talk House, in Tucker’s latest work, Fern Hill, and in A.R. Gurney’s play Love Letters. Eikenberry has performed her solo cabarets at Feinstein’s 54 Below, with Songs I’ve Sung and Here I Go Again.
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, most 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
“The White Album,” by Joan Didion. Copyright © 1979 by Joan Didion. Collected in The White Album (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979). Used by permission of Janklow & Nesbit.
“Goodbye to All That,” by Joan Didion. Copyright © 1967, 1968 by Joan Didion. Collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968). Used by permission of Janklow & Nesbit.
