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 in a co-production of Our Town with Deaf West Theatre and the 2023 Tony Award–winning Pasadena Playhouse. Kaczmarek most recently starred in The Changeling on AppleTV+, starring LaKeith Stanfield, and the short film Now I Lay Me Down, which was screened at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in 2024. She can currently be seen in Hulu’s Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, which premiered on April 10th. Her favorite job is raising her three kids and reading/hosting Selected Shorts across America.
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times "100 Best Books of the Century.” Lee's third novel, American Hagwon, is forthcoming in September 2026. Lee serves as the New York State Author Laureate from September 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She served as the Editor of Best American Short Stories 2023. Lee’s essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times of London. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She lives in Harlem with her family.
Hettienne Park is best known for her role as Beverly Katz on Hannibal and Tamika Collins on Stephen King's The Outsider. Her additional screen credits include Don’t Look Up, written and directed by Adam McKay, Gossip Girl, The OA, Blacklist, High Maintenance, Bride Wars, Damages, The Good Wife, Young Adult, Blindspot, 9-1-1: Lonestar, Prodigal Son, Law & Order, The Last Of Us, Black Rabbit, The Girls on the Bus, and more. Park appeared on Broadway in Seminar with Alan Rickman and Off-Broadway in Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, earning her a Theatre World Award, honoring her outstanding debut both on Off- and on Broadway. Park most recently appeared on Netflix’s The Beast in Me alongside Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys.
Evelyn Waugh (1903 – 1966), whom Time magazine called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, short stories, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.
Esther Yi is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Y/N, which was published in 2023 and shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her second book, To God, is a collection of short stories set to be published this October by Penguin Random House
CREDITS
“Moon,” by Esther Yi, from The Best American Short Stories 2023 (Mariner Books, 2023) and Y/N by Esther Yi, copyright © 2023 by Esther Yi. First appeared in The Paris Review (Issue 240, Summer 2022). Adapted version of the text used by permission of Astra Publishing House.
