Guest host Maulik Pancholy presents two stories about families. In Heather Monley’s “Paddle to Canada,” a risky family boating trip becomes contested history. Jenna Ushkowitz is the reader. And Jamel Brinkley’s “A Family” shows people coming together in unexpected ways after a loss. Brandon J. Dirden performs this Best American Short Stories selection.
The Artists
Maulik Pancholy is best known for his roles on the award-winning NBC comedy 30 Rock and on Showtime’s Weeds. Additional television credits include Star Trek: Discovery, Whitney, Web Therapy, The Comeback, The Good Wife, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, The Sopranos, and the animated series Sanjay & Craig and Phineas & Ferb. His film credits include 27 Dresses, Hitch, and Friends with Money, among others. On stage, he has appeared in Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, India Awaiting and the Broadway production ofIt's Only a Play and has performed at The New Group, Culture Project, Samuel Beckett Theatre, and the Summer Play Festival at the Public Theatre, among others. He will appear at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer in Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons, and his first book, The Best at It, will be released this October by HarperCollins.
Heather Monley’s fiction has been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Day One, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her story “Town of Birds” won The Kenyon Review’s Short Fiction Contest in 2013. Monley, who is based in the San Franciso Bay area, has an MFA from Columbia University and was a fellow at The Lighthouse and resident at PLAYA.
Jenna Ushkowitz is best known for her leading role on Glee, as well as film roles in Yellow Fever and most recently, Hello Again. On stage, she has appeared in Spring Awakening, Waitress, and The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway, and in regional productions of Hair and The Wedding Singer. Ushkowitz is the co-founder of the podcast network At Will Radio. Ushkowitz made her producing debut with the Broadway revival of Once On This Island, winning her a Tony Award; she is also a producer of Be More Chill, currently playing at Broadway's Lyceum Theater.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of the short story collection A Lucky Man. His writing has been featured in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, A Public Space, Glimmer Train, The Threepenny Review, LitMag, Epiphany, American Short Fiction, as well as TheBest American Short Stories 2018. He was the 2016-17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and currently serves as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.
Brandon J. Dirden, a regular SELECTED SHORTS reader, starred on Broadway as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Tony Award-winning production of All the Way, with Bryan Cranston, and as Booster in the recent Tony Award-winning revival of August Wilson's Jitney. Additional Broadway credits include Clybourne Park, Enron, and Prelude to a Kiss. Off-Broadway, he has appeared in The Piano Lesson, for which he won Obie, Theatre World, and AUDELCO awards; The First Breeze of Summer and Day of Absence at Signature Theatre; Detroit ’67 at the Public Theater and Classical Theatre of Harlem; and Peter and the Starcatcher at New York Theatre Workshop. On screen he has appeared in The Good Wife, The Big C, Public Morals,The Get Down, The Accidental Wolf, Blue Bloods, The Quad, and four seasons of FX’s The Americans as Agent Dennis Aderholt.
