On Repeat

Bruce Altman’s numerous film and television credits include Glengarry Glen Ross, Matchstick Men, Arbitrage, Touched with Fire, the Peabody Award-winning Nothing Sacred, The Sopranos, Blue Bloods, Modern Family, Mr. Robot, Madoff, HBO’s Emmy Award–winning films Recount and Game Change, Chicago P.D., Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed, Orange Is the New Black, Power Book II: Ghost, Master, and the forthcoming film Montauk. His extensive theater career includes productions at Yale Rep, Long Wharf, the American Conservatory Theater, and the Theater for the New City.

Charles Baxter is the 2012 winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is the author of Harmony of the World, Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, First Light, Shadow Play, Saul and Patsy, The Soul Thief, The Feast of Love, which became the basis of a 2007 film and was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, and Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, the Lawrence Foundation Award, the Michigan Author of the Year Award, a Michigan Council for the Arts Grant, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Fellowship. Baxter was the Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota for 18 years.

Edie Falco is best known for her starring roles on Oz, The Sopranos, Nurse Jackie, Law & Order True Crime, Tommy, and American Crime Story. She has also appeared in the films Trust, Reversal of Fortune, Cop Land, Random Hearts, Freedomland, Sunshine State, Gods Behaving Badly, The Comedian, Landline, Megan Leavey, Outside In, Viper Club, The Land of Steady Habits, and Avatar: The Way of Water. She has earned several Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG awards, and is the first female actor to receive the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama. She has appeared on Broadway in The House of Blue Leaves, Sideman, Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, and ’night Mother. Upcoming films include Avatar 3, The Parenting, and I’ll Be Right There.

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He is best known for his Cairo Trilogy, as well as The Children of Gebelawi, The Thief and the Dogs, and Adrift on the Nile among his other works. In 1989, Mahfouz was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor from the American University in Cairo, and he was elected to both the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ntozake Shange (1948–2018) was a renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and performer, best known for her Broadway-produced and Obie Award–winning choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. She wrote numerous works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Wild Beauty, and Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo.

Tamara Tunie is an American film, stage, and television actress, director, and producer. She is best known for her roles on As the World Turns and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Tunie has appeared in a number of movies, including Wall Street, Rising Sun, The Devil's Advocate , and Flight. She received a Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female nomination for her performance in the 2001 drama film The Caveman's Valentine. In 2010, she made her directing debut with romantic comedy film See You in September. Tunie also received the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2007 for producing Spring Awakening and Obie Award for Distinguished Performance by an Actress in 2016 for Familiar. Her recent credits include Cowboy Bebop, Harlem, A Journal for Jordan, and I Wanna Dance with Somebody.

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

“oh she gotta head fulla hair” by Ntozake Shange. From Spell #7: A Play with Music. Copyright © 1978 by Ntozake Shange. Collected in Children of the Night: The Best Stories by Black Writers 1967 to the Present. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

“Half a Day” by Naguib Mahfouz, trans. By Denys Johnson-Davies. From The Essential Naguib Mahfouz (American University in Cairo Press, 2011). Used by permission of the American University in Cairo Press.

“Fenstad’s Mother” by Charles Baxter from A Relative Stranger. First appeared in The Atlantic (September 1988). Copyright © 1988 by Charles Baxter. Used by permission of Darhansoff Verrill Feldman Literary Agents.