McSweeney's 25th Anniversary Extravaganza

Ophira Eisenberg is a standup comedian, writer, and the host of the new comedy podcast Parenting Is a Joke with iHeart Radio and Pretty Good Friends. She also hosted NPR’s Ask Me Another, where she interviewed hundreds of celebrities, including Sir Patrick Stewart, Rosie Perez, Yo-Yo Ma, Awkwafina, Roxane Gay, Nick Kroll, Chelsea Handler, and more. She’s appeared multiple times on CBS’s The Late Late Show, Comedy Central, and is regular host and teller on The Moth Radio Hour, and her stories are included in three of The Moth’s best-selling collections, including the most recent: How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth. Her memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy, was optioned for a television series, and her new comedy special, Plant- Based Jokes, is streaming on YouTube.

Nathan Englander is the author of The Ministry of Special Cases, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Dinner at the Center of the Earth. He also translated The New American Haggadah. His latest novel, kaddish.com, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in March 2019, and was longlisted for the Wingate Prize, 2020 and the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize honoring a mid-career writer.

Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and now lives in Tel Aviv. A recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, he is the author of the memoir The Seven Good Years and story collections including Fly Already; The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God; The Nimrod Flipout; and Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. His work has been translated into over forty-five languages and appeared in TheNew Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Paris Review, and the New York Times, among other publications.

Stephin Merritt releases albums under the band names the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes. With The Magnetic Fields, he has written, produced, and recorded twelve albums to date. The Magnetic Fields' 1999 album, 69 Love Songs, was a 3-disc masterwork which garnered Merritt widespread acclaim, including "best of" year-end lists in Spin, Rolling Stone, TheNew York Times, and more. He has composed original music and lyrics for three music theater pieces directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, and in 2008, mounted an Off-Broadway stage musical of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, for which he won an Obie Award. Merritt composed the score for the Academy Award–nominated film Pieces of April and for the independent film Eban and Charley. His song "The Book of Love" was performed by Peter Gabriel and appears in the film Shall We Dance. He has composed incidental music for the HarperCollins' audio books of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and subsequently released an album Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events. For the last two years, the Magnetic Fields have been on tour to support their 2020 release, Quickies, on Nonesuch records.

Andy Richter is an actor/writer/game show host who played Conan O’Brien’s TV wife for many years. He currently hosts a podcast called The Three Questions.

Ernie Wang’s short fiction and essays have been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, Mississippi Review, PEN America, Best Debut Short Stories, The Threepenny Review, among others. Wang was the recipient of PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and “Stay Brave, My Hercules” was published in the 2018 PEN America Best Debut Short Stories. He is a PhD student at the University of Houston.

BD Wong received the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Theatre World, and Clarence Derwent awards for his Broadway debut in M. Butterfly. He is currently playing Nora's dad Wally on Comedy Central's Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens. Additional Broadway credits include You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Pacific Overtures. On screen, he has appeared in Father of the Bride, Mulan, Seven Years In Tibet, Bird Box, the Jurassic Park franchise, All-American Girl, Oz, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Awake, Madam Secretary, Gotham, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, and Mr. Robot. Wong appears in the upcoming film Heart of Stone, and he recently directed the World Premiere of both Yes I Can Say That, starring Judy Gold, and Mr. Holland's Opus, The New Musical, the latter of which he co-wrote with Wayne Barker.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, among other books. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and 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.