ACTORS & ARTISTS
Jane Gardam is the only author to be honored twice with the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Award, for her novels The Hollow Land and The Queen of the Tambourine. She has written numerous novels, children’s books, and short stories, including Last Friends and The Stories of Jane Gardam. She has also contributed to BBC Radio programs and written literary reviews for The Spectator and The Telegraph. Gardam has been honored with the Heywood Hill Literary Prize, the David Higham Prize, the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and the Silver Pen Award from PEN. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for her literary contributions and is a member of the Royal Society of Literature.
Sharon Gless is the winner of two Emmys and two Golden Globes for her leading roles in Cagney & Lacey and The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, and has also been honored with ten Emmy nominations. For four decades she has starred in numerous television shows and films, including Queer as Folk, Burn Notice, The Exorcist, Nip/Tuck, The Exorcist, Adoptable, The Gifted, Casualty, and the independent features Once Fallen and Hannah Free. Her theater credits include Misery, Chapter Two, and A Round-Heeled Woman.
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 and most recently can be seen on The Big Bang Theory, This Is Us, Carol's Second Act, and Mixed-ish. In New York, Kaczmarek has appeared on Broadway and off at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, the Public Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, and 6 seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Her recent theater credits include in Long Day's Journey Into Night, Our Town with Deaf West Theatre, and The Year to Come at La Jolla Playhouse. Kaczmarek’s favorite job is raising her three kids and reading/hosting Selected Shorts across America.
Denis O’Hare’s film credits include Garden State, 21 Grams, A Mighty Heart, Michael Clayton, Milk, Duplicity, HBO’s The Normal Heart, Dallas Buyers Club, Lizzie, and The Goldfinch. He won a Tony Award for his performance in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out and a Drama Desk Award for his role in Sweet Charity. He is the co-writer, with Lisa Peterson, and star of An Iliad, which was performed at the New York Theatre Workshop and The Broad Stage in Santa Monica; he and Peterson also co-authored the play The Good Book, which premiered at the Court Theatre in Chicago. His television credits include American Horror Story, True Blood, The Good Wife, The Comedians, This Is Us, and Big Little Lies. He will appear in the forthcoming films Swallow and The Postcard Killings.
Edith Pearlman is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of short fiction. Her story collections include Honeydew and Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Story Prize. She has published more than 250 works in national magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart PrizeCollection.
