With a Little Help

Jenny Allen is a writer and performer whose works include the fable collection The Long Chalkboard and, most recently, Would Everybody Please Stop?, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She wrote and starred in the award-winning one-woman show I Got Sick Then I Got Better. Allen’s writing has been featured in several anthologies, including Disquiet, Please!: More Humor Writing from the New Yorker and The 50 Funniest American Writers, edited by Andy Borowitz.

Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American author whose works include The House of the Spirits, The Stories of Eva Luna; City of the Beasts, Ines of My Soul, ALong Petal of the Sea, the memoir Paula, and most recently, Violeta. Her works, written in her native Spanish, have been translated into 35 languages and adapted into films, stage productions, and radio programs. In addition to dozens of honors throughout her career, Allende has received Chile’s National Literature Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in the United States, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Roberta Colindrez originated the role of Joan in the Tony Award–winning Broadway production of Fun Home. On television, she can currently be seen in A League of Their Own, as well as the feature films Unidentified Objects and Cassandro. Colindrez's additional television credits include memorable roles in I Love Dick, The Deuce, Vida, Mrs. America, and Monsterland, as well as appearances in Girls, The Good Fight, Home, Mr. Robot, Mrs. America, Monsterland, and The Harper House. Upcoming projects include the Netflix limited series Eric.

Jackie Hoffman is best known for her Emmy-nominated role of Mamacita from FX’s Feud: Betty and Joan. She can currently be seen in Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the feature film A Good Person, and Paramount+’s Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. Additionally, her numerous on-screen credits include The Politician, Gilmore Girls, Girls, The Good Wife, Inside Amy Schumer, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Birdman, Kissing Jessica Stein, The Sitter, Garden State, and Mo’ Money. On Broadway, Hoffman has co-starred in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, On the Town, The Addams Family, Xanadu, and Hairspray. Her show Jackie Hoffman: Live from Joe’s Pub is available on CD and for streaming. Upcoming projects include the film You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!

Jennifer Mudge can currently be seen in the HBO series Somebody Somewhere. On stage, she has appeared in Rocky, The Philanthropist,Reckless, The End of Longing, Into the Woods (Lucille Lortel Award nomination), Dutchman (Drama Desk nomination), Molière in the Park’s Tartuffe (NYT Critic’s Pick), The Plot at Yale Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville’s remote-capture Romeo and Juliet: Louisville 2020, and more. Her film and television credits include The Irishman, The Surrogate,Twelve, Nostalgia, The Drummer, Beautiful Dreamer, MyAmerica, Shades of Blue, Boss, TheRequin, and Elementary. Mudge’s producing credits include Broadway for Biden’s A Concert for the Soul of the Nation and NYCLU’s Sing Out for Freedom.

Grace Paley (1922 - 2007) is the daughter of Ukrainian/Russian Jewish immigrants, growing up in The Bronx. Works include The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Later the Same Day, Collected Stories, and Just As I Thought. She taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University, City College of New York, and Syracuse University, and was a founder of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, the 1989 Edith Wharton Award, the 1994 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts, the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1992, and the Vermont Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1993. In 1989, Governor Mario Cuomo declared her the first official New York State Writer. She was Vermont's Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2007. Her poetry includes Long Walks and Intimate Talks, Leaning Forward, New and Collected Poems, Begin Again, Fidelity, published posthumously in 2008, and A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry, published in 2017. She has been called a combative pacifist. Her literary life and personal responsibilities were inseparable from her political life and human responsibilities.

Among Kathleen Turner’s numerous accolades are Golden Globes for Romancing the Stone and Prizzi’s Honor, an Academy Award nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married, Tony Award nominations for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a BAFTA nomination for Body Heat, and two Grammy Award nominations. Her film credits include The Man with Two Brains, Jewel of the Nile, The Accidental Tourist, The Virgin Suicides, The Swearing Jar, and The Estate, among many others. On Broadway, she has also starred in High, The Graduate, and Indiscretions. Additional theater credits include Bakersfield Mist on the West End in London; Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit Of Molly Ivins at Philadelphia Theatre Company, the Geffen Playhouse, Arena Stage, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and Mother Courage and Her Children and The Year Of Magical Thinking at Arena Stage. Also a best-selling author, Turner’s books include Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles and Kathleen Turner on Acting.

Born and raised in Florida, Laura van den Berg is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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

“How to Take Dad to the Doctor” by Jenny Allen, from Would Everybody Please Stop? (Sarah Crichton Books, June 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Jenny Allen. Used by permission of A3 Artists Agency.

“Friends” by Laura van den Berg, from I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Laura van den Berg. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Little Heidelberg,” by Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. From The Stories of Eva Luna (Penguin, 1991). Copyright © 1989 by Isabel Allende. Used by permission of the author.

The works of Grace Paley are under copyright, and they are featured here with the permission of Union Literary and Nora Paley.

“Injustice” © 1995 by Grace Paley. Reprinted in A Grace Paley Reader (2017), edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley.