Pride Inside

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, cultural strategist, and author of the poetry collections When the Chant Comes and More Than Organs. In 2024, they were named a 2024 Disabled Futures Fellow by United States Artists, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Barrett has served as a guest faculty member at the Poetry Foundation and received fellowships and residencies from Millay Arts, Tin House, MacDowell, VONA, Lambda Literary, Macondo, and The Home School. They have been featured at the United Nations, Lincoln Center, the Whitney, MoMA, Chicago Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, and universities including Princeton, Columbia, and Yale. Barrett’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, PBS NewsHour, Al Jazeera, Poetry, Asian American Literary Review, NYLON, Buzzfeed, WBAI Radio, and NPR, among others. They were named one of the “9 Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Writers You Should Know” by Vogue magazine. Barrett is the recipient of the 2021 ALA Barbara Gittings Stonewall Honor Book Award.

Michelle Beck is an actor, filmmaker, and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, New York. As an actress, she has had recurring roles on Starz’s Power Book II: Ghost and Marvel’s Luke Cage, as well as appearances in The Good Fight, Fleischman Is in Trouble, Manifest, Homeland, Claws, Madam Secretary, Ovum, Ambition’s Debt, Death of a Prince, and Spinning Into Butter. She has worked on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun, and her extensive New York and regional theater credits include Hurricane Diane with the New York Theater Workshop, Richard III and Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Public Theater, A Kid Like Jake with LCT3, Richard and Jane and Dick and Sally with Playwright’s Realm and Baltimore Center Stage, As You Like It and The Tempest at BAM and the Old Vic, Much Ado About Nothing with Theater for a New Audience, Measure for Measure with Epic Theatre Ensemble, and The Changeling with Red Bull. Beck directed the 2024 short film The Traumatist, which screened at the Blackbird and New Jersey film festivals, and her short, The Snakes, is available to view on HBO Max. As a teaching artist, Beck is the Director of Film at Epic Theater Ensemble, where students from Title 1 schools generate original theater and film pieces focused on social justice issues.

Becca Blackwell has collaborated with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Erin Markey, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf, Lisa D'Amour, and more. Film and television credits include High Maintenance, Ramy, Marriage Story, Shameless, Deadman's Barstool, Jack in the Box, If Found, Sort Of, She’s Clean, You Can’t Stay Here, BROS, and Survival of the Thickest. Their solo shows, They, Themself and Schmerm and Schmermie's Choice, have toured across the US. Blackwell was a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, the Franklin Furnace Award, and the Creative Capital Award. In 2021, Blackwell made their Broadway debut in Is This a Room and have a new one-person show, Back to She.

Ivan E. Coyote is the author of thirteen fiction and nonfiction works, including Boys Like Her, Close to Spider Man, Bow Grip, winner of the ReLit Award for Best Fiction and the Stonewall Book Award Honor, One in Every Crowd, Gender Failure, Tomboy Survival Guide, also a Stonewall Book Award Honor winner, and Rebent Sinner. Coyote is a filmmaker, musician, stage performer, columnist for Xtra! and Xtra! West, and contributor to The Georgia Straight and CBC Radio. Their show, Playlist, premiered in 2024 at the Metro Studio Theatre. They were the 2018-2019 Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University, and currently serves as a Specialist in Inclusion and Creative Expression at Yukon University, where they are also an Honorary Doctor of Arts. Coyote’s latest work, Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures, was published in 2021.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours, which was adapted into an award-winning film. His works also include the novels Day, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen, and the short story collection A Wild Swan, as well as the nonfiction Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. Cunningham has received the PEN/Faulkner Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he lectures at Yale University.

Mike Doyle has appeared on screen in New Amsterdam, City on a Hill, The Romanoffs, the Law & Order franchise, The Accidental Wolf, Narcos: Mexico, Jersey Boys, The Invitation, Green Lantern,Fallout, and The Greatest, among others. His stage credits include The New Century at Lincoln Center and Betrayed with the Culture Project. Doyle wrote and directed the feature films Almost Love starring Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, and Scott Evans, and Passing Through, in which he also stars with Kevin Daniels and Amy Ryan. His next film, Bookends, stars F. Murray Abraham and Caroline Aaron.

Larry Keigwin has danced his way from the Metropolitan Opera to downtown clubs to Broadway and back. He founded KEIGWIN + COMPANY in 2003, and the company has performed at The Kennedy Center, The Joyce Theater, and New York City Center, among many others. Commissions include Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance, Royal New Zealand Ballet, The Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Juilliard School. His work in musical theater includes Tales of the City, the off-Broadway production of Rent, for which he received the 2011 Joe A. Callaway Award, and If/Then on Broadway. In 2022, he developed Rhapsody, a community work featuring professional dancers, community members, and live music that enlivens local parks in celebration of art-making, humanity, and shared space. Keigwin is the Director of Dance and a co-founder of the Green Box Arts Festival in Green Mountain Falls, CO, as well as the Dance Editor of ArtDesk.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut collection of short stories, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and winner of The Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Philyaw is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and was the 2022–2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Philyaw co-hosts the podcasts Ursa Short Fiction with Dawnie Walton and Reckon True Stories with Kiese Laymon. She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction, including The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which is being adapted by HBO Max with Philyaw serving as an executive producer alongside Tessa Thompson. Her debut novel, The True Confessions of a First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from HarperCollins’s Mariner Books in 2026.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.

CREDITS

“No Bikini” by Ivan E. Coyote, from Close to Spider Man (Arsenal Pump Press, 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Ivan E. Coyote. Used by permission of Arsenal Pulp Press.

“Sleepless” 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.

“Snowfall” by Deesha Philyaw, from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press, 2020). First appeared in The Baltimore Review (Winter 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Deesha Philyaw. Used by permission of Upstart Crow Literary.

“Song for the Kicked Out” by Kay Ulanday Barrett. First appeared online on kaybarrett.net (2012). Copyright © 2012 by Kay Ulanday Barrett. Used by permission of the author.