Love & Prohibition

ACTORS & ARTISTS

Joanna Gleason is a Tony Award-winning actress best known for her roles on Broadway in I Love My Wife, Joe Egg, It’s Only a Play, Into the Woods, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Her extensive film career includes roles in Heartburn, Boogie Nights, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Skeleton Twins, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Sex and the City. Her television credits include recurring roles on ER, The West Wing, The Practice, Tracey Ullman, Friends, The Good Wife, Blue Bloods, The Affair, Sensitive Skin, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In 2007, Gleason was honored by the New England Theatre Conference with a Special Award for Achievement in Theatre, and she has also received the Rockefeller Award from SUNY Purchase for Artistic Achievement.

Jamaica Kincaid’s works include the short story collection At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the nonfiction books A Small Place, Talk Stories, and Among Flowers, and the novels Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. Kincaid’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review and The New Yorker, where she worked as a staff writer for twenty years. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and the Dan David Prize in Literature. Kincaid is currently the Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard.

Carson McCullers (1917 - 1967), considered a leading voice in Southern Gothic literature, rose to prominence with the publication of her critically acclaimed first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Subsequently, McCullers wrote three novels, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and Clock Without Hands, and numerous short stories, poems, and plays. Her Broadway adaptation of The Member of the Wedding won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1950, and the 1963 adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Café was nominated for six Tony Awards. McCullers died from complications following a stroke, and the collection The Mortgaged Heart as well as her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, were published posthumously.

James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, he directed the Tony-nominated productions of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Paul Newman. He also directed the television production of Our Town for Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including The Devil Wears Prada, Damages, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, The Blacklist, The Affair, Equity, Odd Mom Out, The Tap, The Independents, and The Romanoffs.

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.

George Saunders is the author of the short story collections and novellas CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, and Tenth of December, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the Man Booker Prize. His writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GQ. He is the recipient of the Folio Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award, the National Magazine Award, a World Fantasy Award, and the Story Prize, as well as fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. Saunders teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. His next book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life will be published in January 2021.

Hattie Winston is a stage and screen actress best known for her work on Becker and The Electric Company. Film and television credits include Nurse, Clara’s Heart, A Show of Force, Beverly Hills Cop III, Sunset Park, Homefront, Jackie Brown, Port Charles, True Crime, The Battle of Shaker Heights, Scrubs, ER, Numb3rs, Cold Case, Castle, Mike & Molly, All Grown Up!, and The Soul Man. On stage, Winston appeared in the Public Theatre’s productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona and Mother Courage and Her Children, as well as productions of The Me Nobody Knows and The Tap Dance Kid.