Perfectly Unmatched

Michael Cerveris is the two-time Tony Award and Grammy Award–winning Broadway star of Fun Home and Assassins. Additional Broadway credits include Tammy Faye, Sweeney Todd, The Who's Tommy, Evita, Titanic, LoveMusik, Cymbeline, Hedda Gabler, Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), and many others. His numerous off-Broadway credits include King Lear, Road Show, Nine Lives, and Nassim. On film and television he has been featured in Fringe, Treme, Madam Secretary, The Good Wife, The Mexican, Cirque du Freak, The Tick, Gotham, Mosaic, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Elementary, Evil, The Plot Against America, Billions, The Gilded Age, and Basic Psych. Cerveris also works as a musician, both solo and with his band, Loose Cattle.

Brandon J. Dirden starred on Broadway as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Tony Award–winning production of All the Way with Bryan Cranston, and as Booster in the Tony Award–winning revival of August Wilson’s Jitney. Additional Broadway credits include Skeleton Crew, for which he was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards, the 2022 revival of Take Me Out, Clybourne Park, Enron, and Prelude to a Kiss. His many Off-Broadway appearances include the world premiere of Detroit ’67 and The Piano Lesson, for which he won Obie, Theatre World, and AUDELCO awards. On screen he has appeared in The Good Wife, The Big C, Public Morals, Manifest, The Get Down, The Accidental Wolf,Blue Bloods,The Quad, For Life, Mrs. America, and four seasons as Agent Aderholt on FX’s hit series The Americans. Dirden is an Associate Arts Professor in the Graduate Acting Program at NYU Tisch and a proud member of Actors Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA.

Kathryn Erbe is known for her work on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Oz. Additional television credits include City on a Hill, American Experience, The Good Fight,The Sinner, How to Get Away with Murder, Instinct, and Pose. Her film credits include Don’t Pick Up, The Good House, Stir of Echoes, What About Bob, and Assassination Nation. As a member of the Steppenwolf Theater Company, Erbe has appeared in many productions, including The Grapes of Wrath, Curse of the Starving Class, and A Streetcar Named Desire. She is also a member of the Atlantic Theater Company. Erbe was nominated for a Tony Award for her work in The Speed of Darkness. Additional theater credits include Something Clean, Ode to Joy, The Father, Antigone in Ferguson, and Natural Affection.

Marlon James is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Moon Witch, Spider King; the National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf; the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings; The Book of Night Women; and John Crow’s Devil. In addition to the Booker Prize, his novels have won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Born in Jamaica, James lives in New York City.

Ben Loory is the author of the collections Tales of Falling and Flying and Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, both from Penguin Books. His fables and tales have appeared in TheNew Yorker, BOMB Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, and A Public Space; anthologized in The New Voices of Fantasy and Year’s Best Weird Fiction; and heard on This American Life. He is also the author of a picture book for children, The Baseball Player and the Walrus. Loory lives and teaches short story writing in Los Angeles.

Roger Mais (1905 – 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was the author of short story collections Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, as well as the novels The Hills Were Joyful Together, Brother Man , and Black Lightning. In 1968, Mais was posthumously awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal by the Institute of Jamaica, and in 1978, he was awarded the Order of Jamaica.

William Trevor (1928 – 2016) was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He was the author of many novels and won many prizes, including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His novel Love and Summer was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He was also a renowned short story writer, and his two-volume Collected Stories was published by Viking Penguin in 2009. In 1999 Trevor received the prestigious David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement, and in 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature. In 2008 he received the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature.

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 Man and the Moose” by Ben Loory, from Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (July, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Ben Loory. Used by permission of Funke Literary.

“Red Dirt Don’t Wash,” by Roger Mais, from Listen, the Wind (Longman Trade/Caroline House, 1986). Copyright © 1986 by Roger Mais.

“The Piano Teacher’s Pupil” by William Trevor, from Last Stories (Viking, 2018). First published in The New Yorker (June 19, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by The Estate of William Trevor. Used by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.