Muldoon's Picnic (November 2019)

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and is in the process of being adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out earlier this year. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo credit: Heather Weston

Bridget Kearney & Benjamin Lazar Davis met in 2004 as students at the New England Conservatory of Music. The ensuing decade and half has included many collaborations for the two, while each maintain busy schedules as solo performers and band members (Kearney plays in soul-pop band Lake Street Dive and Davis plays in indie-folk band Cuddle Magic; both have solo albums out under their own names). They released a duo EP, Bawa, in 2015, written and recorded in Accra, Ghana, and released by Signature Sounds. 2019 brought them back to Accra to record a full-length album, which is expected to be released in 2020. 

Shane McCrae is the author of six books of poetry: The Gilded Auction Block; In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award, and won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry; The Animal Too Big to Kill, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award; Forgiveness Forgiveness; Blood; and Mule. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the 2017 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and social critic Anna Quindlen has appeared in some of America’s most influential newspapers, magazines, and prominent fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists. Quindlen's newest New York Times bestseller, Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting, celebrates the love and joy and many lessons learned from being a grandmother. Her latest bestselling novel, Alternate Side, is a provocative look at what it means to be a mother, a wife, and a woman at a moment of reckoning. Quindlen serves on the Board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and is an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow. The Child Welfare League of America established "The Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism on Behalf of Children and Families.” She holds honorary degrees from more than 20 colleges and universities.

Photo credit: Maria Krovatin

Rogue Oliphant is: Sim Cain (drums), Chris Harford (guitar), David Mansfield (guitar), Cáit O'Riordan (bass), Warren Zanes (guitar)