Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than 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; The U.S. and the Holocaust; The American Buffalo; Leonardo da Vinci; The American Revolution and, most recently, The American Revolution. Future film projects include Henry David Thoreau, 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. In 2025, he received the Critics Choice Documentary Awards IMPACT Award.
Willa Cather (1873 – 1947) was a canonical American writer, the peer of hercontemporaries 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.
When you think of Sonia Manzano, you immediately think of children and television. Her most recent accomplishment was creating a children’s program, Alma’s Way, for PBS Kids. The series has won two Imagen Awards for Best Youth Programing, a 2022 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program, and a 2023 NAACP nomination for an Image Award. But what Ms. Manzano is best known for performing the role of “Maria” on Sesame Street for 44 seasons, where her work affected the lives of millions of parents and children and garnered her two Emmy Award nominations in addition to the National Academy of Arts and Science’s Lifetime Achievement Daytime Emmy in 2016. As a writer for the show, she took home 15 Emmys. In 2022, Manzano was honored with the Beacon Award from PBS. She is also an author whose most recent Scholastic novel, Coming Up Cuban, set in 1959, follows the lives of four children who represent different intersections of race and class during the Cuban Revolution.
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; A Little Prayer; The Luckiest Man in America; O Horizon; and Zootopia 2. His television credits include The Sopranos, House, Fairfax, and A Man on the Inside, along with many others. His many theater credits are highlighted by the play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, the story of a courier for both the Polish and Jewish Undergrounds who was the first to deliver eye-witness reports of the Holocaust to the West in 1943, which Strathairn toured through the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Poland. His additional theater credits include the American premiere of Vaclav Havel’s Leaving at the Wilma in Philadelphia; Tom Stoppard’s and Andre Previn’s Every Good Boy Does Fine at the Kimmel Center with the Philadelphia Orchestra; Scorched, The Tempest, and Underneath the Lintel at ACT in San Francisco; Strindberg’s Ghosts at Seattle Rep; and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at Classic Stage Company in New York.
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. A musical of The Interestings is in development. 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 works of Willa Cather are in the public domain.
