Sharon Olds and Cynthia Nixon

Sharon Olds’s numerous collections of poetry include Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize; One Secret Thing (Random House, 2008); Blood, Tin, Straw (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); and The Father (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds’s following collection, The Dead & the Living (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Olds held the position of New York state poet laureate from 1998 to 2000. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York.

Cynthia Nixon is a Tony, Emmy, and GRAMMY award-winning actress who has been acting professionally since the age of 12. She is best known from the Sex and the City TV series and movies but has appeared in over 40 plays, a dozen of them on Broadway. She has appeared in movies as diverse as Little Darlings, Amadeus, and Five Flights Up. Last season, she directed Tonya Pinkins and Dianne Weist in Rasheeda Speaking at the New Group. Nixon recently completed filming Terence Davies’ next film, A Quiet Passion, in which she plays the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson. She will next be seen starring in director Josh Mond’s James White, a film that won the Audience Award at Sundance this past year, to be released in the fall. Also this fall, she will be directing Motherstruck at The Culture Project and Steve at The New Group. She lives in the East Village with her wife Christine and their children Sam, Charlie, and Max.