Purva Bedi is an actress and writer whose theater credits include Dance Nation, for which she received a 2019 Drama Desk Award, and productions with Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, the Manhattan Theater Club, New York Theatre Workshop, and many more. Her film and television appearances include One of Us Is Lying, Billions, High Maintenance, She's Gotta Have It Too, Madam Secretary, Nurse Jackie, The Blacklist, The Assistant, The Surrogate, Sully, American.ish, Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn, American Desi, and Gabriel’s Rapture. Bedi is co-creator of the web series Shrinkage and has written/co-written Gorgeous Nothings, Dolly's Dream Bimari, and the feature screenplay Preeti Popped It.
William Boyd is the author of sixteen novels, including The Blue Afternoon, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; A Good Man in Africa; An Ice Cream War; Any Human Heart; and Trio. He has also published several collections of short stories, including On the Yankee Station, The Destiny of Nathalie 'X', and Fascination. He is the screenwriter of the films Stars and Bars, Chaplin, A Good Man in Africa, and The Trench, which he also directed. He also created the miniseries Spy City, which aired in 2020. Boyd adapted his own novel Any Human Heart into a four-part drama for television, which received a BAFTA for Best Drama Serial. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2005, he was awarded the CBE.
Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction and was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness which was published this month by Knopf. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Born in Kolkata, India, Chakrabarti now lives in New York with his family.
Elizabeth Crane is the author of several short-story collections, including Turf and When the Messenger Is Hot, which was adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company, as well as the novels The History of Great Things and We Only Know So Much, which was adapted into a feature film. Crane teaches in the UCR–Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. Her memoir, This Story Will Change, was released by Counterpoint Books in August 2022.
Valorie Curry is a founding member of Los Angeles’ Ovation Award-winning Coeurage Theatre Company, with which she starred in Balm in Gilead and the West Coast premiere of Shakespeare’s Double Falsehood. Additional theater credits include One Day When We Were Young at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Diviners at The Kennedy Center, and The Diary of Anne Frank at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts. On television, she has appeared in The Following, Veronica Mars, Psych, CSI: New York, House of Lies, The Tick, The Lost Symbol, and The Boys. Her film credits include Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Blair Witch, American Pastoral, After Darkness, and Inherit the Viper. Curry is the founder of the production company 26 Films and a member of New York’s Fundamental Theater Project.
Dan Stevens is known to fans of Downton Abbey for the role of Matthew Crawley and for David Haller on Legion. His film and television credits include The Guest, Beauty and the Beast, Marshall, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Apostle, Lucy in the Sky, The Call of the Wild, High Maintenance, The Rental, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Blithe Spirit, I Am Your Man, Gaslit, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and Welcome to Chippendales Stevens has narrated numerous audiobooks. Upcoming projects include Cuckoo and Godzilla and Kong.
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
“Blue Girl'' by Elizabeth Crane. From You Must Be This Happy to Enter: Stories (Akashic Books, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Crane. Originally published as a FeatherProff mini-book. Used by permission of Jean Naggar Literary Agency.
“Lessons with Father” was commissioned by Symphony Space for the collection Small Odysseys: Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Stories, edited by Hannah Tinti, published by Algonquin Books. © 2022 by Symphony Space.
“Varengeville” by William Boyd, from Fascination: Stories (Alfred A. Knopf 2005). First published in The New Yorker (November 1998). Collected in Stories of Art and Artists (Everyman 2014). Copyright © 1998 by William Boyd. Used by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.
