Ken Burns has been making documentary films for over forty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; Prohibition; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; The Vietnam War; Country Music; and, most recently, The U.S. and the Holocaust. Future film projects include The American Buffalo, Leonardo da Vinci, The American Revolution, Emancipation to Exodus, and LBJ & the Great Society, among others. Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations. In September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In November of 2022, Ken was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.
Willa Cather (1873 – 1947) was a canonical American writer, the peer of her contemporaries Wharton, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she spent two decades as a journalist, educator, and editor. With O Pioneers!, published when Cather was 40, she emerged as one of the most admired and widely read novelists of the early twentieth century. Cather wrote twelve novels, six collections of short fiction, a book of poetry, and a large body of nonfiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours and, in 1944, the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Sonia Manzano is an actress, educator, television producer, and children’s book author. She created the part of Maria on Sesame Street, for which she received an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. Manzano has also received 15 Emmys for writing, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Award, the Hispanic Heritage Award for Education, and a Poderosa—most powerful woman award—from People en Espanol. Her children’s books include A World Together, No Dogs Allowed!, A Box Full of Kittens, Miracle on 133rd Street, The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, and the memoirs Becoming Maria and Coming Up Cuban. Manzano created the animated series for PBS, Alma's Way.
In addition to appearing in several films written and directed by John Sayles, David Strathairn’s film work includes the portrayal of Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, And Good Luck, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, Howl, Dolores Claiborne, American Pastoral, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Temple Grandin, for which he received an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Lincoln, Fast Color, UFO, Nomadland, Nightmare Alley, the play and film of Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, and the soon to be released Angus MacLachlan film, A Little Prayer.
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
The works of Willa Cather are in the public domain.
