Unwrapping the Holidays

Jayne Atkinson is best known for her long-running roles on the television series 24, Criminal Minds, and the Netflix Original House of Cards. A two-time Tony nominee, she has appeared on Broadway in All My Sons, The Rainmaker, Ivanov, Enchanted April, for which she won an Outer Critics Circle Award, and Blithe Spirit. Additional film and television credits include The Good Wife, Law & Order, The Education of Max Bickford, Syrianna, Recount, Free Willy, The Village, Madame Secretary, Bluff City Law, Clarice, and Baby Ruby.

Teagle F. Bougere recently portrayed James Baldwin in the American Vicarious virtual production of Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley, and co-starred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the webseries Queen America. Additional theater credits include The Crucible, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Tempest on Broadway; Socrates at The Public Theater, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Cymbeline in Central Park, The New Englanders at Manhattan Theater Club, A Soldier’s Play at Second Stage, and A Fair Country at Lincoln Center. His film and television credits include Hill ’n’ Gully, Good Friday, Conviction, Cosby, The Job, Third Watch, Murder in Black and White, Night at the Museum, The Imposters, The Pelican Brief, Two Weeks Notice, What the Deaf Man Heard, Bull, and The Blacklist.

John Cheever (1912 - 1982) was the author of four novels, a novella, and more than 100 short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award, and The Stories of John Cheever was awarded both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Cheever was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among numerous honors.

Sherrie Flick is the author of the flash fiction chapbook I Call this Flirting, the novel Reconsidering Happiness, which was a semi-finalist for the VCU First Novelist Award, and the short story collections Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been featured in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, The Wall Street Journal, Creative Nonfiction, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Western Pennsylvania History, among other publications. She currently teaches in the Food Studies and MFA programs at Chatham University. She edited the story collection Flash Fiction America: 73 Very Short Stories which will be published in February 2023.

James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, he directed the Tony-nominated productions of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Paul Newman. He also directed the television production of Our Town for Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including The Devil Wears Prada, Damages, The Paper Chase, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, Turks & Caicos, The Affair, The Tap, The Independents, The Romanoffs, The Accidental Wolf, and And Just Like That….

Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965 - 2017) was the author of more than thirty children’s books, four memoirs, including The Book of Eleven: An Itemized Collection of Brain Lint and Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, and a line of keepsake journals. She was also the creator of the short films 17 Things I Made, The Kindness Thought Bubble, and The Reckoning of Lovely. Rosenthal’s work was featured in The New York Times, Hallmark Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Parenting, among other publications, and she was a frequent contributor to NPR and the TED Conference.

Adina Verson was most recently seen as Poppy White on the hit series Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. She was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for her role in The Lucky Ones, following her Broadway debut in the Tony Award-winning play Indecent. Additional theater credits include productions at Playwrights Horizons, Atlantic Theatre Company, MCC, The Vineyard, Theater for a New Audience, Yale Rep, Seattle Rep, the Guthrie, and Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Verson’s additional screen credits include The Strain, Mozart in the Jungle, Wormwood, The Kitchen, New Amsterdam, and the Sundance selected short film Troy.

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.

CREDITS

“Interview with God” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. First commissioned by NPR for Hanukkah Lights 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Used by permission of The Amy Rennert Agency.

“Heidi Is Dead” by Sherrie Flick, from Whiskey, Etc. (Autumn House Press, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by Sherrie Flick. Used by permission of the author.

“Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” by John Cheever, from The Stories of John Cheever (Knopf, 1978). First appeared in The New Yorker (December 1949). Copyright © 1949, 1977, 1978 by John Cheever, used by permission of The Wylie Agency.