{: response.message :}
Selected Shorts
Host Meg Wolitzer presents three pieces about losing things: objects, opportunities, a primary sense, a new friendship. In “Any Other” by Jac Jemc, performed by Helen Hong, a woman rejects an offer without knowing the consequences. Namwali Serpell’s “Noseless” is a symphonic composition by turns lyrical and funny about a loss many experienced during the pandemic; it’s performed by Krystina Alabado, Deborah S. Craig, Zach Grenier, and Calvin Leon Smith. And Lauren Groff’s “Such Small Islands” charts the perilous course of a childhood infatuation and betrayal that ends with figurative loss and a literal disappearance. It’s performed by Crystal Dickinson.
Krystina Alabado was last seen starring as Dot in Sunday in the Park with George at the Pasadena Playhouse and as Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls on Broadway. Additional Broadway credits include American Psycho and Green Day’s American Idiot. She has performed in the national tours of Evita, American Idiot, and Spring Awakening, and off-Broadway in The Mad Ones, This Ain’t No Disco, David Bowie's Lazarus, and Camp Wanatachi. Her film and television credits include Disney’s Better Nate Than Ever, A Killer Party, Sunny Day, God Friended Me, First Reformed, FX’s Tyrant, Mecha Builders on HBO Max, and Voltron Legendary Defender on Netflix. Alabado can be heard on the cast albums of The Mad Ones, A Killer Party, Goosebumps The Musical, Star Crossed, and more.
Deborah S. Craig is an actress and singer who has recently been seen in the comedy features Me Time opposite Kevin Hart, Mark Wahlberg, and Regina Hall for Netflix, Meet Cute opposite Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson on Peacock, ABC’s Not Dead Yet, and she voices the rols of Vatten in Tiger’s Apprentice from Paramount Animation. Recent theater credits includes Wild: A Musical Becoming at the American Repertory Theater. On television, she is known for her roles on Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, The Blacklist, Better Things, Workaholics, Transparent, Hart of Dixie, and as a series regular opposite Ken Jeong on the Kevin Kwan pilot The Emperor of Malibu. On Broadway she originated the role of Marcy Park in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which she received a Drama Desk Award and the distinction of creating the first Korean American character on Broadway.
Crystal Dickinson won the Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut in the 2012 production of Clybourne Park. She subsequently appeared in You Can’t Take It With You on Broadway in 2014, A Raisin in the Sun at the Two River Theater, and The Low Road at the Public Theater. Her film and television credits include I Origins, The Good Wife, Feed the Beast, New Amsterdam, and recurring roles on The Chi and For Life. Dickinson has taught at Stella Adler Studio, Spelman College, Pace University, Princeton University, the Juilliard School, NYU, and both of her alma maters, University of Illinois and Seton Hall. She was recently featured in Lessons in Survival at the Vineyard Theatre, Cullud Wattah at the Public, and Covenant at Roundabout Underground. Coming up Dickinson will star in the off-Broadway revival of The White Chip.
Laura Gibson is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and writer. Her most recent release, Goners, was praised by NPR as “a gripping collection of songs about accountability and grief,” Her songs have taken her across four continents and every single state, and she had the distinct honor of performing the very first Tiny Desk Concert. She’s received fellowships from Yaddo, Ucross, and Everglades National Park, and a MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. Her essays have appeared in Talkhouse and The Los Angeles Review, and she was a 2020 recipient of the McElheny Award from MIT for her work on the Timber Wars podcast. Gibson is working on a new record and a book.
Zach Grenier received a Tony nomination for Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations for his performance as Ludwig van Beethoven. He’s known on television for portraying David Lee on CBS’s The Good Wife and its spin-off on Paramount+ The Good Fight, Mayor Feratti on Ray Donovan, and Kenton on Hulu’s Devs. Additional credits include the films She Said, Fight Club, Zodiac, Ride with the Devil, and the television series Law & Order, Deadwood, Touching Evil, and 24. His favorite stage role is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which he played at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.
Lauren Groff is the author of several books, including Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix, all of which were National Book Award Finalists. She is a winner of the Story Prize, a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2017, she was named one of the Best of Young American Novelists by the literary magazine Granta. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Her most recent novel The Vaster Wilds was published in September 2023.
Helen Hong is the host of the trivia podcast Go Fact Yourself and a fan favorite on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. Film and television credits include Inside Llewyn Davis, Parks and Recreation, Blunt Talk, Jane the Virgin, The Thundermans, Huge in France, Silicon Valley, The Expanding Universe of Ashley Garcia, The Unicorn, and Never Have I Ever. Hong has performed stand-up live at numerous venues and festivals worldwide. Her comedy special, Well Hong, can be streamed on Amazon.
Jac Jemc is the author of the novels My Only Wife, winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, and The Grip of It; and the short-story collections A Different Bed Every Time and False Bingo, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Story Prize. Jemc currently teaches creative writing at UC–San Diego.
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction and the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her 2019 debut, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the year’s 100 Notable Books by the New York Times Book Review. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces (Transit, 2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her second novel, The Furrows, was published in 2022.
Calvin Leon Smith was recently seen in the role of Jasper on Amazon’s The
Underground Railroad, on HBO's The Deuce and High Maintenance, and in the Public Theater's production of Fat Ham, which moved to Broadway in 2023. His theater credits include work at The Public Theater, Long Wharf Theatre, Clarence Brown Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, La Jolla Playhouse, and Shakespeare on the Sound. Smith is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the British American Drama Academy, and a 2018 graduate of The Juilliard School, where he received his MFA.
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
“Any Other” by Jac Jemc, from False Bingo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). First appeared in Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder (Black Balloon Publishing, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Jac Jemc. Used by permission of the author.
“Noseless” and “Such Small Islands” were 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.
Radio & Podcast Schedule