Nate Corddry is an actor, comedian, and writer who has recently been featured on the television series Fosse/Verdon, Mindhunter, For All Mankind, and Perry Mason, as well as the Marvel podcast Wastelanders: Black Widow. Additional film and television credits include Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; United States of Tara; Harry’s Law; Childrens Hospital; TRON: Uprising; St. Vincent; The Heat; Mom; The Hindenburg Explodes!; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; The Circle; New Girl; Ghostbusters; Standing Up, Falling Down; Paper Girls; Gaslit; High School; and as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Corddry will appear in the forthcoming Apple TV+ series Suga
Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award for fiction, and Chimerica: A Novel. She is the editor of Alta Journal's California Book Club and served as Fiction Committee Chair for the National Book Critics Circle for 2022. Her short stories have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Alta, Air/Light, Midnight Breakfast, The Normal School, and Joyland. A finalist for a Los Angeles Press Club National Arts and Entertainment awards, she has contributed essays and reviews to the Washington Post, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times (Modern Love), the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.
Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, the author of 27 books, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. King’s Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Arnell Powell has guest starred and recurred on several television series, including Stranger Things, Lone Star 911, Bosch, Snowfall, and most recently as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s father on HBO’s Winning Time. His film appearances include The Conjuring and Hidden Figures. He can be seen in numerous commercials and is an award–winning Audiobook narrator. Powell earned his M.F.A. in Acting from NYU’s Graduate Acting School. He has taught at Harlem School of the Arts as well as for the NYC Dept of Education, and coaches privately here in Los Angeles.
Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who by Fire and Skinny. Her essays and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Esquire, The Guardian, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Glimmer Train Stories, Playboy, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, GQ, Southern Review, and Harper's. She has received awards from Yaddo, A Room of Her Own Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Ucross Foundation, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly newsletter called Dispatches from the Road.
Kirsten Vangsness is best known as Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds, which just began a new season streaming on Paramount+. Her recent performances include starring in the world premiere of the new Phinny Kiyomura play Nimrod at Theatre of NOTE and Justin Elizabeth Sayers’ Lottie Pratchett Took a Hatchet at San Francisco Sketchfest. In 2019, two of her plays, Mess and Cleo, Theo and Wu, were performed at Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to critical acclaim. In her spare time, Vangsness buses tables at the Blinking Owl Distillery.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was one of the grandmasters of modern American letters. Called by The New York Times "the counterculture's novelist," his works guided a generation through the miasma of war and greed that was life in the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century. Vonnegut rose to prominence with the publication of Cat's Cradle in 1963. Several modern classics, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; and Breakfast of Champions soon followed. Vonnegut’s letters, essays, and short stories have been anthologized in dozens of collections, including A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, and Complete Stories.
