Taking Flight with Amy Tan

Yetide Badaki is a Nigerian-born actress known for the Starz fantasy drama American Gods, as well as appearances on Lost, Touch, Criminal Minds, Masters of Sex, and This Is Us. She will be executive producing and starring as the title role in Queen Nzinga on Starz. 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 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Her film credits include RISE, Cardinal X, A Chance of Rain, What We Found, and Run Fast.

Mike Doyle has appeared on screen in New Amsterdam, City on a Hill, The Romanoffs, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Accidental Wolf, Narcos: Mexico, Jersey Boys, The Invitation, The Kill Room, and Green Lantern, among others. His stage credits include The New Century at Lincoln Center and Betrayed with the Culture Project. Doyle wrote and directed the feature film Almost Love starring Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, and Scott Evans, and recently completed the full-length feature Passing Through. Doyle can currently be seen in Fallout on Amazon. Upcoming acting projects include the films Amy Makes Three and The Greatest.

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, Fairy Tale Review, Tin House, The Sewanee Review, Electric Literature, A Public Space, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, The Kenyon Review, and Wigleaf. He has been anthologized in The New Voices of Fantasy, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Tiny Nightmares, and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths; and heard on This American Life. His stories have been selected for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and as Favorite Book of the Year by the staff of The Paris Review, as well as 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time by Esquire. 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.

Heather Monley is an author whose work has been featured in The O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYVA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, New Orleans Review, Hobart,McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Normal School, among others. She received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a fellowship from The Lighthouse Works, and a residency from PLAYA. Her story “Town of Birds” won the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. Monley received her MFA from Columbia University and has since taught a fiction workshop at the university.

Mikkel Rosengaard is an author whose first novel, The Invention of Ana, has been published in five languages. He is a MacDowell Fellow and the recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Unge Kunstneriske Elite award. His work has appeared in Bookforum, McSweeney’s, BOMB, PBS’s Art21, and many other publications. Rosengaard grew up in Elsinore, Denmark, and lives in New York City.

Amy Tan is the author of The Valley of Amazement, The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Opposite of Fate, Saving Fish from Drowning, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, and the children's books The Moon Lady and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat. Tan was a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club and the librettist for the opera The Bonesetter's Daughter. Her most recent book of which she also illustrated, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, was published in April. Tan serves on the board of American Bird Conservancy, the National Poetry Series, and The Community of Writers.

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.

BD Wong has won all five New York theater awards, including the Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Theater World Award, Clarence Derwent Award, and Tony Award, for his Broadway debut in M. Butterfly, an achievement not yet duplicated by another actor for the same role. He has since appeared in numerous Broadway, off-Broadway, and regional theater productions. Wong has appeared in more than 20 feature films, most notably including Heart Of Stone, Bird Box, three Jurassic World films, Focus, Mulan 1 & 2, Seven Years in Tibet, Father of the Bride 1 & 2, and Jurassic Park, among others. On television, he has appeared in The Girls on the Bus, Awkwafina is Nora From Queens, Mr. Robot, for which he received both Emmy and Critics’ Choice Award nominations, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, Gotham, Madam Secretary, Csi: New Orleans, 11 seasons of Law & Order: Svu,Oz, All-American Girl, and more. He has been recognized by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Asian American Journalists Association, Asian AIDS Project, GLAAD, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, The Anti-Violence Project, Lambda Legal, Museum of Chinese in America, and Marriage Equality New York for his presence and participation in the community. He sits on the Board of Trustees of The Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors’ Fund), American Conservatory Theatre, and Rosie’s Theater Kids. Wong was born and raised in San Francisco, CA and currently resides in New York City.

CREDITS

“The Mating Call” by Mikkel Rosengaard. First published in McSweeney’s, 63. Copyright © by Mikkel Rosengaard. Used by permission of the author.

“Town of Birds” by Heather Monley. First appeared in the Kenyon Review (Winter 2014, Vol. XXXVI Number 1). Copyright © 2014 by Heather Monley. Used by permission of the author.

“The Frog and the Bird” by Ben Loory, from Tales of Falling and Flying (Penguin, September 2017). First published in Another Chicago Magazine. Copyright © 2017 by Ben Loory. Used by permission of the author.