Edward P. Jones is the author of two story collections, All Aunt Hagar’s Children and Lost in the City, which was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lannan Literary Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His novel The Known World won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The International Dublin Literary Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a PEN/Malamud Award for the excellence in the art of the short story. Jones is a professor of English at George Washington University.
When you think of Sonia Manzano, you immediately think of children and television. Her most recent accomplishment was creating a children’s program, Alma’s Way, for PBS Kids. The series has won two Imagen Awards for Best Youth Programing, a 2022 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program, and a 2023 NAACP nomination for an Image Award. But what Ms. Manzano is best known for performing the role of Maria on Sesame Street for 44 seasons, where her work affected the lives of millions of parents and children and garnered her two Emmy Award nominations in addition to the National Academy of Arts and Science’s Lifetime Achievement Daytime Emmy in 2016. As a writer for the show, she took home 15 Emmys. In 2022, Manzano was honored with the Beacon Award from PBS. She is also an author whose most recent Scholastic novel, Coming Up Cuban, set in 1959, follows the lives of four children who represent different intersections of race and class during the Cuban Revolution.
Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of Mercury Pictures Presents, The Tsar of Love and Techno, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Daniel Saldaña París is the author of Ramifications, Planes Flying over a Monster, and The Dance and the Fire. He was a 2022–23 Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library,
an Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award winner in 2020, and a finalist for the Herralde Prize in 2021. He currently splits his time between Mexico City and New York.
Jenny Minton Quigley is the series editor for The Best Short Stories of The Year: The O. Henry Prize Winners and the author of the memoir The Early Birds. She is the daughter of Walter J. Minton, the storied former president and publisher of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, who first dared to publish Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov in the United States in 1958. Quigley is a former book editor at several Random House imprints.
Morgan Spector is best known for the role of George Russel on The Gilded Age. On Broadway, he has been featured in A View from the Bridge, Harvey, Machinal, and Fallen Angels, and Off-Broadway with the Rattlestick Theater, the Acorn Theatre, and the Atlantic Theater Company, among many others. Spector’s additional screen credits include Homeland, The Plot Against America, Boardwalk Empire, Christine, A Vigilante, Boston Strangler, Pearson, and I Don’t Understand You. He can currently be seen in the limited series Black Rabbit; upcoming projects include the film Caity.
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
“Rosaura at Dawn by Daniel Saldaña París, translated by Christina MacSweeney, from The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners (Vintage, 2025). First published in The Yale Review (Volume 112, No. 1, Spring 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Daniel Saldaña París. English translation © 2024 by Christina MacSweeney. Used by permission of the author and translator.
“Countdown,” by Anthony Marra, from The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners (Vintage, 2025). First published in Zoetrope: All-Story (Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Anthony Marra. Used by permission of the author.
