Shifting Identities

Yetide Badaki is a Nigerian-born actress known for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and American Gods, as well as appearances on Lost, Touch,Criminal Minds, Masters of Sex, and This Is Us. As a theater actress in Chicago, Badaki won acclaim for her performances at the Victory Gardens Theater and Steppenwolf. She won Best Actress for her role in the film Precipice at the Indie Short Fest. Badaki can currently be seen in Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. Her film credits include RISE, Cardinal X, A Chance of Rain, What We Found, and Run Fast. Badaki co-wrote, produced, and starred in the short In Hollywoodland. Upcoming projects include Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas, Queen Nzinga, and Naija Vamp.

David Costabile is best known for his television work on Billions, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, Damages, Better Call Saul, and Suits. On Broadway, he has appeared in Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Translations; the musical Titanic; The Tempest; and Caroline, or Change, the Drama Desk award-winning musical by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori. Off-Broadway, he has appeared at the Public Theater, Playwright’s Horizons, Roundabout, Classic Stage Company, and others. His additional screen credits include Lincoln, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Obliterated, Waco: The Aftermath, and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. He most recently starred in Season 3 Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+. Upcoming projects include the film Hershey.

Carol Brown Janeway (1944 – 2015), was an editor and award-winning translator. After studying languages at Cambridge, Janeway joined Alfred A. Knopf as a vice president, senior editor, and director of international rights. Her translations include Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, Marie de Hennezel’s Intimate Death, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s In the Cellar, Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Lost, Zvi Kolitz’s Yosl Rakover Talks to God, Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy, Sandor Marai’s Embers, and Yasmina Reza’s Desolation. She was a nominee for Words Without Borders’s Ottaway Award in 2014.

Daniel Kehlmann is a German-language novelist and playwright. His novels include Measuring the World, Fame, The Director, Me and Kaminski, F, and Tyll, which was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. His plays include The Mentor, Christmas Eve, Die Reise der Verlorenen, and Geister in Princeton, which won him the Nestroy Theatre Prize for best play in 2012. He’s written several screenplays such as Nebenan, Confessions of Felix Krull, Verhör in der Nacht, Das letzte Problem, and Measuring the World. In 2024 he was awarded the Ludwig Börne Prize and in 2025 he was awarded the New York Public Library Library Lion. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.

Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. Her novels include On Black Sisters Street and The Middle Daughter. She shuttles between Atlanta, Georgia, and Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is a professor of creative writing at Georgia College. Widely translated, Unigwe has won numerous awards for her writing.

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.

CREDITS

“Voices,” by Daniel Kehlmann , translated by Carol Brown Janeway, from Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes (Knopf, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Kehlmann. Used by permission of Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency.

“Miracle in Lagos Traffic,” by Chika Unigwe, from The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners (Vintage, 2025). First appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review (Spring 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Chika Unigwe. Used by permission of Wolf Literary Services LLC.