Jokes and Poems with Mike Birbiglia and J. Hope Stein

Mike Birbiglia is a comedian, writer, and director. His solo shows, Sleepwalk With Me, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Thank God For Jokes, and The New One, enjoyed successful Off-Broadway runs. The New One moved to Broadway and was filmed for Netflix. Birbiglia wrote, directed, and starred in the films Sleepwalk with Me and Don’t Think Twice. He is a frequent contributor to public radio's This American Life and The Moth Radio Hour. He is the co-author of the book The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad with J. Hope Stein. Birbiglia recently appeared on Broadway in his latest solo show, The Old Man and the Pool.

Jane Curtin has appeared on Broadway in Noises Off, Candida, and Our Town. Her off-Broadway work includes Love Letters and the musical revue Pretzels, which she co-wrote. She starred in the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun and won back-to-back Emmy Awards for her role on Kate & Allie. She is an original cast member of Saturday Night Live and also starred in the television film series The Librarian and its spin-off, The Librarians. Her film credits include Coneheads; Antz; I Love You, Man; I Don’t Know How She Does It; The Heat; The Spy Who Dumped Me; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; Ode to Joy; Godmothered; and Queen Bees. She starred on the television series Unforgettable and has had guest appearances on The Good Wife, 48 Hours ’til Monday, The Good Fight, Broad City, and United We Fall. Upcoming projects include the film Jules, opposite Sir Ben Kingsley.

Joy Harjo served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. She is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior. Harjo received the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She edited the anthol­o­gies When the Light of the World Was Sub­dued, Our Songs Came Through and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry. Harjo is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation.

Jane Kaczmarek is best known for her role as Lois on Malcolm in the Middle, for which she received 7 consecutive Emmy nominations as well as nominations for the Golden Globe and SAG Awards. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Yale School of Drama, Kaczmarek made her television debut on The Paper Chase and Hill Street Blues. On stage, she has appeared on Broadway and off, and for 6 seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Her recent theater credits include Long Day's Journey Into Night with Alfred Molina and Our Town with Deaf West Theatre. Kaczmarek’s favorite job is raising her three kids and reading/hosting Selected Shorts across America.

Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck. Their poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2017, and elsewhere. Lewis teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.

Ada Limón is the author of the poetry collections The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; Sharks in the Rivers; Lucky Wreck; This Big Fake World, and her latest collection The Hurting Kind. She earned an MFA from New York University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Pleiades, Barrow Street Oxford American, and Guernica. Limón serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program. Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July 2022.

Carmen Lynch is a New York-based stand-up comedian who’s been on a string of late-night TV shows, including The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Conan. She is featured in the documentary Hysterical on Hulu, HA Festival: The Art of Comedy on HBO Max, and Inside Amy Schumer on Paramount Plus. Her comedy albums Vertically Obese and Dance Like You Don’t Need the Money can be found on all mainstream platforms as well as her podcast The Human CentiPOD, which also airs on SiriusXM.

Andrea Martin is a two-time Tony Award winner for her performances in the musicals My Favorite Year and Pippin, and a two-time Emmy award winner for her work on SCTV. Additional Broadway credits include Oklahoma!, Candide, Young Frankenstein, and Noises Off. On film, Martin appeared in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 1 and 2, and Night at the Museum 3, among others. Her TV credits include UnbreakableKimmy Schmidt, 30 Rock, Modern Family, Hairspray Live, Difficult People, Great News, Elena of Avalor, and The Good Fight. She can currently be seen on Evil for Paramount Plus, Amazon's Harlem, and Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. Her memoir, Lady Parts, was published in 2014.

Simon Rich is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He has written for Saturday Night Live, Pixar, and The Simpsons and is the creator of the TV shows Man Seeking Woman and Miracle Workers, which he based on his books. His other collections include Ant Farm, Spoiled Brats, New Teeth, and Hits and Misses, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based artist working in theater, opera, and film. Schaal's work has shown in divergent contexts from NYC basements, to courtyards in Vietnam, to East African amphitheaters, to European opera houses, to US public housing, to rural auditoriums in the UAE. Domestically, her work has shown at BAM, LA Philharmonic, The Shed, The Kennedy Center, Walker Arts Center, MCA Chicago, REDCAT, The New Victory Theater, NYLA, PS122, New Orleans Center for Contemporary Art, CAC Cincinnati, PICA, and On the Boards. Schaal has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, and Creative Capital Award.

David Sedaris is a humorist, author, comedian, and radio contributor. He is the author of Calypso, Theft By Finding, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He is also the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. Sedaris’s pieces appear regularly in The New Yorker and have twice been included in The Best American Essays. His original radio pieces can be heard on This American Life, and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4. Sedaris and his sister Amy have collaborated on several plays under the name “The Talent Family,” including Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and The Book of Liz. In 2013, A feature film adaptation of his story “C.O.G.” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the art book David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium was published in 2017. His essay collection Happy-Go-Lucky was published this past May.

Maggie Smith is the author of Good Bones,The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her latest collection of poems, Goldenrod, was released in July 2021. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, The New York Times,The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, TheWashington Post, TheGuardian, and elsewhere. She was a 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2016, her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, will be published in April 2023.

Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. The Autograph Man won The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize, and On Beauty won the Orange Prize for Fiction, A Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. NW was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Swing Time, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker 2017. Her first essay collection, Changing My Mind, was published in 2009, followed by Feel Free in 2018 and Intimations in 2020. Smith is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists. She writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Her recent play, The Wife of Willesden, earned her a 2022 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award. Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, will be released in September 2023.

J. Hope Stein is a poet and the author of Little Astronaut. Her work has been published in TheNew York Times, TheNew Yorker, and Poetry International. She is the co-author of The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad with her husband, Mike Birbiglia.

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, mostly 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.

CREDITS

Stories and poems by Mike Birbiglia and J. Hope Stein, from The New One (Grand Central Publishing, 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Mike Birbiglia and J. Hope Stein. Used by permission of the authors.

“New Client” by Simon Rich, from Hits and Misses (Little Brown, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Simon Rich. Used by permission of the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency.

“When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows” by Paige Lewis, first published in Poem-a-Day (December 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Paige Lewis. Used by permission of the author.

“Rain, New Year’s Eve” by Maggie Smith, from Good Bones: Poems (Tupelo Press, October 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Smith. Used with permission of the Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Tupelo Press, tupelopress.org.

“The Cat and the Baboon” by David Sedaris, from Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (Little, Brown and Company, September 2010). Copyright © 2010 by David Sedaris. Read and broadcast with the permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.

“What I Didn't Know Before” by Ada Limón, from The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, August 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón. Used with permission of the Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org.

Joy Harjo, "Praise the Rain" from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of the Author. All rights reserved.

“Grand Union” from Grand Union by Zadie Smith. Published by Penguin. Copyright © Zadie Smith. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.