Muldoon's Picnic (October)

Chris Collingwood is a singer, songwriter, producer and co-founder of the rock band Fountains of Wayne. FOW released their first album in 1996 and were nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 2004. Collingwood's current band, Look Park, released its eponymous debut, hailed by Salon.com as “one of the best rock albums of the year,” in 2016. It was produced by Mitchell Froom (Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Crowded House) and features Michael Urbano (Cracker, Smash Mouth) on drums and Davey Faragher (Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello) on bass. Look Park toured extensively after the album’s release and are doing sporadic dates while working on a follow-up LP. The touring trio includes indie luminaries and multi-instrumentalists Scott Klass (The Davenports) and Philip Price (Winterpills).

Mark Doty is the recipient of the first Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellowship. His nine books of poems have been honored by the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His most recent collection, Deep Lane, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2016. His five volumes of nonfiction prose include Heaven’s Coast, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, Firebird, the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book of the Year, and Dog Years, a New York Times bestseller. What Is the Grass, an inquiry into the work and soul of Walt Whitman, will be published by Norton in 2019 for the 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birth.

Photo credit: Nancy Crampton

Aleksandar Hemon was born in 1964, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. He came to the US as part of a month long cultural exchange program of journalists but was granted political asylum when Sarajevo came under siege.  Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, Love and Obstacles, The Making of Zombie Wars and a collection of auto-biographical essays, The Book of My Lives. He is working on his next novel, tentatively titled The World and All That It Holds, as well as three works of nonfiction, How Did You Get Here?: Tales of Displacement (oral histories) and My Parents: An Introduction (memoir) and This Does Not Belong to You (memoir), all forthcoming from FSG. How Did You Get Here? was the recipient a PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History in 2017.  He is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Columbia College, Chicago.

Photo Credit: Velibor-Božović

Sarah Ruhl's plays include How to Transcend a Happy Marriage; For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday; The Oldest Boy; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee for best new play); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play (Pen American award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Orlando; Late: a cowboy song; Dear Elizabeth; Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); Eurydice; and Stage Kiss. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. Her plays have been produced on Broadway at the Lyceum by Lincoln Center Theater, off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, and at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Her plays have been produced regionally all over the country and have also been produced internationally, and translated into over twelve languages. Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has received the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright award, the Susan Smith Blackburn award, the Whiting award, the Lily Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur "genius" award. Her book of essays 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write was published by Faber and Faber was a Times Notable Book of the Year. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Photo Credit: Zack De Zon

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