Mia Dillon is a Tony-nominated stage actress whose Broadway credits include Our Town, The Miser, The Corn Is Green, Hay Fever, Agnes of God, Crimes of the Heart, and Da. She has worked extensively off-Broadway and regionally from San Diego to Dublin, and her work has been honored with the CT Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk nomination, the Clarence Derwent Award, a Dramalogue Award, among others. Film and TV appearances include all three Law & Orders, Brain Dead, The Jury, Mary and Rhoda, Gods and Generals, The Money Pit, Ordinary World, All Good Things, Never Rarely Sometimes, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Petronia Paley is an actress, director, playwright, and teacher. Her film and television credits include Annie Hall, Damages, Blue Bloods, Modern Love, New Amsterdam, Little America, Billions, Faces, 2 Days in New York, and Naomi & Eli’s No-Kiss List. On Broadway, she has been seen in The First Breeze of Summer with the Negro Ensemble Company, On Golden Pond, and The Gin Game. Her one-woman play, On the Way to Timbuktu, won an Audelco Award for Best Solo Performance. She received an Audelco Directing Award for Looking for Leroy at New Federal Theatre. Paley recently directed I Don’t Do That by Mona R. Washington with the Negro Ensemble Company.
Michael Potts is an actor whose extensive screen career includes performances in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Rounding, Night Music, Prodigal Son, The Wire, True Detective, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Allegiance, Bored to Death, Flight of the Conchords, Show Me a Hero, and Oz. On Broadway, he originated the roles in The Book of Mormon and The Prom, and was in companies of The Iceman Cometh, Jitney, Grey Gardens, and Lennon. Additional New York stage credits include The Tempest, Richard III, for which he earned a Falstaff Award, and The American Play, for which he earned an Obie Award. Upcoming projects include Rustin, Out of Order!, and The Piano Lesson.
A native Texan, Annette Sanford (1929 – 2012) taught high-school English before becoming a full-time writer. For ten years she wrote romance novels to support herself while writing short stories. She published twenty-five romance titles under the pseudonyms Mary Carroll, Meg Dominique, Anne Shore, Lisa St. John, and Anne Starr. Her short stories were featured in New Stories from the South and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and she was the author of the short story collections Lasting Attachments and Crossing Shattuck Bridge and the novel Eleanor and Abel.
Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His debut short story collection, Lot, was published in 2019 and his first novel, Memorial, was published in 2020, both by Riverhead Books and Atlantic Books UK. He’s received a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honor, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award, an Ernest J. Gaines Award, an International Dylan Thomas Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, a Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, and GQ, among other publications. His second novel, Family Meal, will be published in October.
Hilma Wolitzer is the author of the novels An Available Man, Summer Reading, The Doctor’s Daughter, Tunnel of Love, Silver, and more, the non-fiction work The Company of Writers, and the novels for young readers Wish You Were Here, Toby Lived Here, Out Of Love, and Introducing Shirley Braverman. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, New York University, Columbia University, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Wolitzer’s first published story appeared when she was thirty-six, and her first novel eight years later.
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.
CREDITS
“Trip in a Summer Dress’ by Annette Sanford. Copyright © 1989 by Annette Sanford. From Lasting Attachments. Used by permission of Southern Methodist University Press.
“Palaver” by Bryan Washington. First published in McSweeney’s, 62. Copyright © 2020 by Bryan Washington. Used by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic.
