ACTORS & ARTISTS
Michael Cunningham is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, which was adapted into an award-winning film. His works also include the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen, and the short story collection A Wild Swan, as well as the nonfiction Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. His writing has appeared in TheAtlantic Monthly, Redbook, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. Cunningham has received the Whiting Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Yale University.
Valorie Curry is a founding member of Los Angeles’ Ovation Award-winning Coeurage Theatre Company, with which she starred in Balm in Gilead and the West Coast premiere of Shakespeare’s Double Falsehood. Additional theater credits include One Day When We Were Young at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Diviners at The Kennedy Center, and The Diary of Anne Frank at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts. On television, she has appeared in The Following, Veronica Mars, Psych, CSI: New York, House of Lies, and the Amazon series The Tick. Her film credits include Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Blair Witch, American Pastoral, After Darkness, and Inherit the Viper. She is the founder of the production company 26 Films and a member of New York’s Fundamental Theater Project.
John Cameron Mitchell is the co-creator of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He also directed the films Shortbus, Rabbit Hole, and How to Talk to Girls at Parties. His film and television credits as an actor include Girls, Vinyl, Mozart in the Jungle, Shrill, and The Good Fight. He toured internationally with The Origin of Love: The Songs and Stories of Hedwig, culminating at Town Hall for 50th Pride in June 2019. Mitchell is the co-creator of the musical Anthem: Homunculus with Bryan Weller and featuring himself, Glenn Close, Denis O'Hare, Patti Lupone, Cynthia Erivo, and Nakhane, presented as a podcast by the Luminary Podcast Network.
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.
Kirsten Vangsness is best known as Penelope Garcia on the CBS drama Criminal Minds; however, she can be found in other places, including a few podcasts (Selected Shorts and Voyage to the Stars), the film noir spoof Kill Me Deadly, and Curtains, the animated short she created, which was released in 2020. She was nominated for Playwright of the Year by LA Weekly and is a company member of Hollywood's Theater of NOTE. Vangsness recently returned from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where two of her plays, Mess and Cleo, Theo and Wu, were performed at Assembly Rooms. In her spare time, Vangsness buses tables at the Blinking Owl Distillery, which she co-owns, in Santa Ana.
