What’s Left Behind

ACTORS & ARTISTS

Joan Allen began her New York career off-Broadway in a production of And a Nightingale Sang. Her Broadway credits include Burn This, for which she received a Tony Award for Best Actress, The Heidi Chronicles, Impressionism, and The Waverly Gallery. She is an original member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has appeared in more than 25 productions, including Balm in Gilead and The Wheel. Allen is a three-time Academy Award nominee, receiving Best Supporting Actress nominations forNixon andThe Crucible, and a Best Actress nomination forThe Contender. Additional film credits include Pleasantville, Face/Off, The Notebook, The Ice Storm, The Upside of Anger, The Bourne Identity series, and Room. On television, she is known for her portrayal of Georgia O’Keefe in the 2009 biopic of the same name, and she has had recurring roles in Luck, The Killing, The Family, and Lisey’s Story.

Julia Alvarez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer best known for her novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. She has published numerous collections of poetry and works of non-fiction, most recently, The Woman I Kept to Myself and A Wedding in Haiti: The Story of a Friendship. In addition to her adult works, she has written many books for young readers, including Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free and Where Do They Go? A recipient of a 2013 National Medal of Arts and many other awards and honors, Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Her most recent novel, Afterlife, was published in 2020.

Greg Ames teaches writing and literature courses at Colgate. He is the author of Buffalo Lockjaw, a novel that won a NAIBA Book of the Year Award, and Funeral Platter, a collection of twenty short stories, including "Benefactor," which was featured on Selected Shorts. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading,Southern Review, McSweeney’s, The Sun, Catapult, and North American Review, among many others. His short fiction has been cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Laura Gómez is an actress and writer best known for her role as Bianca Flores on Orange Is the New Black. She has been featured on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the miniseries Show Me a Hero, and Anne Plus. Gómez has directed three short films, The Iron Warehouse, Hallelujah, and To Kill a Roach, which won the NYU Technisphere Award in 2012. She is a member of Women Artists Writing, a non-profit group giving voices to female theater artists.

Amy Hempel is the author of Sing to It, The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Reasons to Live, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, Tin House, The Harvard Review, The Quarterly, and have been widely anthologized, including Best American Short Stories and The Best Nonrequired Reading. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College, and at Stony Brook Southampton.

Michael McKean is recognized for film and television roles including Laverne & Shirley, Young Doctors in Love, This Is Spinal Tap, Clue, Coneheads, Saturday Night Live, The Brady Bunch Movie, Best in Show, The X-Files, A Mighty Wind, Food: Fact or Fiction?, and recent turns on Better Call Saul, for which he won a Satellite Award, the adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens, Grace and Frankie, The Good Place, At Home with Amy Sedaris, and Breeders. McKean has appeared on stage in productions of The Pajama Game, Our Town, Superior Donuts, King Lear, All the Way, The Little Foxes, and The True. He is also a Grammy winner for the title song in the film A Mighty Wind, shared with regular collaborators Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy. For the same film, he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song for “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” which he co-wrote with his wife, Annette O’Toole.

Annette O'Toole’s film and television credits include Cat People, 48 Hrs, Cross My Heart, Superman III, The Kennedys of Massachusetts, for which she received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, the It miniseries, Nash Bridges, Smallville, Halt and Catch Fire, 11.22.63, Women Who Kill, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, The Punisher, Blow the Man Down, and Kidding. She has appeared on stage in productions of The Good Book, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, The Show-Off, The Traveling Lady, Man from Nebraska, Southern Comfort, for which she received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Actress in a Musical and Drama Desk and Drama League nominations, Hamlet in Bed, Magnolia, and The Seagull. She can currently be seen on the Netflix series Virgin River. For the film A Mighty Wind, O’Toole received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song for “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” which she co-wrote with her husband, Michael McKean.

Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel, The Female Persuasion, was published in 2018 and became an immediate New York Times bestseller. Her previous novels include The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She has also published novels for young readers. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University, Skidmore College, the University of Houston, Boston University, and Barnard College, and currently teaches at Stony Brook Southampton. Wolitzer served as guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017.

Credits

“Funeral Platter” by Greg Ames, from Funeral Platter (Arcade, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Greg Ames. Used by permission of the author.

“Liberty” by Julia Alvarez. Copyright 1996 by Julia Alvarez. First appeared in Writer’s Harvest 2 edited by Ethan Canin, published by Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996. Used by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, NY and Lamy, NM. All rights reserved.

“The Dog of the Marriage” by Amy Hempel. Copyright © 2006 by Amy Hempel. Collected in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel (Scribner, 2006). Used by permission of the author.