Revise the Rules

Purva Bedi is an actress and playwright. She is the co-creator of the comedy series Shrinkage, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime. Her extensive theater credits include Dance Nation, for which she was honored with a 2019 Drama Desk Award. Wives at Playwrights Horizons, Passage with Soho Rep, India Pale Ale at the Manhattan Theater Club, An Ordinary Muslim with New York Theatre Workshop, and many more. Bedi is an Associate Artist of Target Margin Theater and member of the Actors Center Workshop Company. Her film and television appearances include roles on Billions, High Maintenance, She's Gotta Have It Too, Madam Secretary, Nurse Jackie, The Blacklist, The Assistant, The Surrogate, Sully, American.ish, Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn, and American Desi. Upcoming projects include writing two plays in development, Gorgeous Nothings with Dorset Theatre Festival and Dolly's Dream Bimari.

Roxane Gay is the author of numerous essay collections and works of fiction, including Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger, as well as the comic series World of Wakanda. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The New York Times, Rumpus, Oxford American, Salon, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Time. She is the founder of Tiny Hardcore Press and founding editor of PANK, and editor of collections including Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and the 2018 edition of TheBest American Short Stories. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University. Recent works include Graceful Burdens, The Banks with artist Ming Doyle, the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness, and as editor of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.

John Lithgow is an actor, poet, author, and singer. His extensive stage, television, and film career has earned him multiple Tony, Emmy, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards, as well as Grammy and Academy Award nominations. He has appeared on Broadway in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Sweet Smell of Success, M. Butterfly, and The Changing Room. His film credits include The World According to Garp, Terms of Endearment, Harry and the Hendersons, Kinsey, Dreamgirls, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Beatriz at Dinner, Pitch Perfect 3, Late Night, Pet Sematary, and Bombshell. On television, he has starred in Third Rock from the Sun, Twenty Good Years, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Trial & Error, The Crown, Perry Mason, and the forthcoming miniseries The Old Man. He is the author of several satirical books of poetry, the memoir Drama: An Actor’s Education, and numerous children’s books. Lithgow received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the National Book Award finalist short story collection Her Body and Other Parties; the memoir In the Dream House; and the limited-run comic series The Low, Low Woods. Her fiction and essays have appeared in TheNew Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and Guernica, among other publications. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow and the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections, often about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999.

Curtis Sittenfeld is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, Eligible, and the story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, of which she was the 2020 guest editor. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Vanity Fair, and on public radio’s This American Life. Sittenfeld’s latest work, Rodham: A Novel, was published in May 2020.

Emily Skeggs is a Tony and Grammy Award-nominated actor, writer, and vocalist. A born and bred New Yorker, her off-Broadway and regional theater credits include Take Me Along at the off-Broadway Irish Rep, David Cromer’s Our Town at the Huntington Theater Company, and Naomi Wallace’s And IandSilence at the Signature Theater Company. She was nominated for Tony and Grammy awards for her role in the 2015 Best Musical winning production of Fun Home at Circle in the Square. Film and television credits include WGN’s Salem, Dustin Lance Black’s ABC miniseries When We Rise, and Lifetime’s Love You To Death starring opposite Marcia Gay Harden, and Dinner in America, from director Adam Rehmeier, which debuted at Sundance 2020. You can currently see her in Hulu’s American High and The Ultimate Playlist of Noise. You can currently find her in Los Angeles, where she maintains a small veggie garden, speaking to her plants. She recently taught her cat to sit.

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up in India and Oman, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She was recently a Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed Reader, AGNI, The Juggernaut, and Platypus Press, among other publications. She is also the founder of the BedStuyStrong mutual aid network. Her debut novel is forthcoming.