Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of the short-story collection What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Minnesota Book Award for Fiction, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her stories have won a National Magazine Award, the Caine Prize, and the O. Henry Prize, and she has been a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published the poetry collection Dearly. Atwood has been honored with the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. Atwood’s latest short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, will be released in March 2023.
Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories, film, and television for all ages, including Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and The View from the Cheap Seats. His fiction has received Newbery, Carnegie, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner Awards. American Gods, based on the 2001 novel, is now a critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated TV series, and he was the writer and showrunner for the mini-series adaptation of Good Omens, based on the book he co-authored with Sir Terry Pratchett. Gaiman was an Executive Producer and co-showrunner for Netflix’s TV adaptation of his Sandman comic book series. He is currently developing season 2 of Good Omens and a TV adaptation of Anansi Boys. In 2017 Gaiman became a Global Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Originally from England, he now divides his time between Scotland, where Good Omens and Anansi Boys are filmed, and the United States, where he is a Professor in the Arts at Bard College. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
Zainab Jah is best known for her role in Eclipsed on Broadway, for which she won Obie and Drama Desk awards. Additional theater credits include the title role in Hamlet; Boesman and Lena; Venus at Signature Theatre; The Convert; and School Girls, Or, The African Mean Girls Play. Film and Television credits include Farewell Amor, Only Murders in the Building, The Good Lord Bird, False Positive, Homeland, and The Accidental Wolf. On audiobooks, Jah can be heard narrating Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Anjali Sachdeva's All the Names they Used for God. Upcoming screen projects include All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and Seacole.
Jane Kaczmarek is best known for her role as Lois on Malcolm in the Middle, for which she received 7 consecutive Emmy nominations as well as nominations for the Golden Globe and SAG Awards. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Yale School of Drama, Kaczmarek made her television debut on The Paper Chase and Hill Street Blues. On stage, she has appeared on Broadway and off, and for 6 seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Her recent theater credits include Long Day's Journey Into Night with Alfred Molina and Our Town with Deaf West Theatre. Kaczmarek’s favorite job is raising her three kids and reading/hosting Selected Shorts across America.
Christina Pickles has appeared on and off-Broadway in Man and Superman, The Seagull, You Can’t Take it With You, War and Peace, The Misanthrope, A Pagan Place by Edna O’Brien, and Chez Nous by Peter Nichols. She received Los Angeles Critics Awards for Cloud Nine, Undiscovered Country, and The Letters of Janet Flanner. Her television credits include Saint Elsewhere, earning her five Emmy nominations; Friends, for which she received an Emmy nomination as Ross and Monica’s dysfunctional mother; How I Met Your Mother; Childrens Hospital; Dollface; Great News; Doubt; and 9JKL. Her films include Grace of My Heart, Legends of the Fall, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, The Wedding Singer, and Finding Hannah.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer 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
“The Martians Claim Canada” by Margaret Atwood, first published in Granta 141 (November 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Margaret Atwood.
“Options” was commissioned by Symphony Space for the collection Small Odysseys: Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Stories, edited by Hannah Tinti, published by Algonquin Books. © 2022 by Symphony Space.
“Chivalry” by Neil Gaiman. Copyright © 1992 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Grails: Quests, Visitations, and Other Occurrences. Collected in Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman. Read by permission of Writers House and the author.
