Survival Skills

ACTORS & ARTISTS

Eve Best’s acting volleys between New York and England. She won the 2005 Olivier Award for Best Actress for playing the title role in Hedda Gabler and made her Broadway debut in the 2007 revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and receiving the first of two nominations for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play; the second was for the revival of The Homecoming in 2008. She returned to Broadway in the 2015 revival of Old Times. Best’s film and television appearances include Prime Suspect: The Final Act, Waking the Dead, Nurse Jackie, Life in Squares, Lucky Man, A Woman of No Importance, and Fate: The Wings Saga. She can be seen in the forthcoming series House of the Dragon.

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.

Andrea Levy (1956 – 2019) was born in England to Jamaican parents who came to Britain in 1948. She wrote six books, including Small Island, which was the unique winner of both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread book of the Year, in addition to the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize Best of the Best. Her most recent novel, The Long Song, won the Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of the novel What You See in the Dark and the short story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been recognized with a Whiting Writers Award, three O. Henry Awards, and an appearance in Best American Short Stories. His next collection, The Consequences, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in late 2022 or early 2023.

Monica Raymund stars on the hit-crime drama series Hightown on STARZ. For her performance, Raymund received a Best Actress - Television Drama Imagen Award Nomination. Raymund starred for 6 Seasons on NBC’s Chicago Fire, earning the Imagen Award for Best Actress - Television Drama. Additional credits include Lie to Me and The Good Wife as well as the films Arbitrage and Happy Baby. As a director, Raymund was part of the inaugural class of Female Forward, NBC’s initiative aimed at increasing female representation in the director’s chair. She has directed episodes of Law & Order: Svu, FBI, The Sinner, and an episode in the upcoming Second Season of Hightown. She directed the short film Tanya for the Hidden Tears Project, a non-profit media company developing content to bring awareness to sex trafficking. Raymund is a graduate of The Juilliard School.

CREDITS

“Loose Change” by Andrea Levy. Copyright © 2005 by Andrea Levy. First published in The Independent on Sunday. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

“Anyone Can Do It,” copyright © 2018 by Manuel Muñoz. First published in Zyzzyva (No. 2, Fall 2018), and forthcoming in The Consequences: Stories by Manuel Muñoz (Graywolf Press). Used by permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.