Dan Adler

Dan Adler is the Executive Vice President and Head of Programming at Sharp Entertainment, a part of Sony Pictures Television. In the top programming position at the unscripted production company, he oversees a slate of more than 350 unscripted hours per year.

Adler’s credits include some of the biggest franchises on television like TLC’s ratings juggernaut 90 Day Fiancé and WE’s number one series Love After Lockup, as well as the 2022 breakout hits Inmate to Roommate on A&E and Love Off the Grid for Max. In 2023, Adler also oversaw Bravo’s new ballroom dance docuseries Dancing Queens, the second season of Help! I’m in a Secret Relationship! for MTV, as well as TLC’s new ensemble series Last Resort and their forthcoming social experiment Love & Translation.

Since he joined Sharp Entertainment in 2009, Adler has produced some of the highest rated, and critically acclaimed, cable programs of the last decade. During his tenure he has overseen thousands of hours of television, repeatedly transforming specials and pilots into hit series and spinoffs like Travel Channel’s Man v Food, National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers, Science Channel’s Punkin Chunkin, and TLC’s Extreme Couponing. For Discovery ID his credits include Dates From Hell, Momsters, and The Secret Lives of Stepford Wives. And for A&E and Lifetime he has overseen multiple seasons of Biography, Bad Ink, and Marrying Millions.

Janine Annett

Janine Annett is the author of the humor book I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo?” Years Old. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many other places. She has taught humor writing for the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Gotham Writers, Thurber House, and the Hudson Valley Writers Center. She lives in New York with her husband, son, and dog.

Christine Barker

Christine Barker is the author of Third Girl from the Left, a New York Times Editor’s Book choice and a Good Morning America “Buzz book.” Her memoir describes her professional life as a dancer performing in A Chorus Line on Broadway at the onset of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s. Before joining the New York cast, she opened the show in London at the Drury Lane Theatre. In addition to many national tours and off-Broadway productions, she was featured in numerous national television commercials. After retiring from her theatre and film career, she attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction. She is originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, but she now lives in Connecticut. She is married and has two children.

Lisa Belkin

Lisa Belkin is an award-winning journalist and the author of narrative nonfiction books, including Genealogy of a Murder and Show Me a Hero, made by David Simon into an HBO miniseries. Her career at the New York Times includes stints as a national correspondent, medical reporter, and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She lives in Westchester, New York.

Marcia Bradley

Marcia Bradley, seeking a ‘second life,’ moved from Los Angeles to study at Sarah Lawrence College earning her MFA in 2017 after receiving her BA from Antioch University. Marcia believes many people face untenable situations causing life altering choices to be made; her novel and published pieces focus on these themes. She has received a Bronx Council on the Arts/New York City BRIO Award for Fiction and was a Pushcart nominee in 2022. Her writing has appeared in The Chicago Review of Books, Two Hawks, Eclectica, Drunk Monkeys, The Writing Disorder, Hippocampus, and The Capital Gazette among others. A native of Chicago, Marcia teaches at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in the Bronx. https://marciabradley.com/

Marcia Bradley’s debut novel, The Home for Wayward Girls, published by HarperCollins on April 4th, is on “Goodreads 105 of the buzziest novels of 2023 list.”

Growing up in the 1990s, a young girl escapes her abusive parents–and the “ranch” they run for “bad” girls—becoming an advocate for teen runaways and a foe of today’s Troubled Teen Industry where teens are sent to programs in isolated locales and wilderness camps. This heartfelt novel offers hope despite harrowing circumstances and pays homage to the difference teachers and librarians make in students’ lives.
Marcia’s novel was written to honor her sister who spent her life in residential programs.

Ari Brand

Ari's first play, Scenes From Childhood was staged in early 2020 for a brief run in downtown Manhattan. Set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis in New York City, Scene's From Childhood brings to life a family of performers wrestling with ambition, tragedy and the stories we tell about who we are. Using multiple media, including live VHS video and several piano pieces from the Romantic era, the play spans two generations and thirty years, as Ari portrays the two main characters based on himself and his late father, the concert pianist Natan Brand.

Ari has performed on stages on and off-Broadway and across the country under the direction of a number of celebrated theater makers, including Tony Kushner, David Cromer, Bartlett Sher, James Lapine, Mary Zimmerman, Michael Greif and Kathleen Marshall, and alongside acclaimed actors such as David Straithairn, Oscar Isaac, Laurie Metcalf and Tony Shalhoub. He can also be seen on film and television, playing Danny in the FX series Fosse/Verdon with Sam Rockwell and Michelle WIlliams (who won an Emmy for her performance); Jem Moreland on Amazon's multi-Emmy-winning series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; and as a guest on other series including The Other Two, Blue Bloods, FBI, FBI: International, and White Collar.
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Ari played the title character in My Name Is Asher Lev, the acclaimed off-Broadway play based on Chaim Potok’s novel. He performed the role of Asher Lev 363 times over 11 months at the Westside Theater in midtown Manhattan, in what the New York Times called “a haunting performance as a child who grows into a man, suffering the torture of a talent that offends the world into which he was born.” The play won the Outer Critic's Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play.
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Ari lives in Manhattan with his wife Caitlin, a professor at Rutgers University, and their two children.

Kate Brandt

Kate Brandt is a writer, adult literacy teacher, traveler, and student of Buddhism. She is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, and her work has appeared in literary anthologies and a number of publications, including Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Literary Mama, The Westchester Review, and Redivider. Hope for the Worst is her first novel--a book about being in love, despair, magic, and the redemption of female friendship. To read more of Kate's writing, go to her website, Katebrandt.net. You can also find her on instagram and twitter @Kbrandtwriter.

Heather Cabot

Heather Cabot is an award-winning journalist, author and speaker. She is currently co-authoring LEVEL UP (Penguin Portfolio, 2022) with voting rights champion Stacey Abrams and Now Corporation CEO Lara Hodgson. She is the author of THE NEW CHARDONNAY (Crown Currency, 2020) and co-author of GEEK GIRL RISING (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). A former ABC News correspondent, Heather also serves on the alumni board of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a trustee of Community Synagogue of Rye. She and her husband, Neeraj Khemlani, president and co-head of CBS News, are proud parents of twins Ian and Samantha.

Margot Clark-Junkins

Margot Clark-Junkins has written about art and culture for the Rye Record and she has curated exhibits and led art tours for the Rye Arts Center. Her book on WWII will be published by Roman & Littlefield in 2024. Margot is one of the directors of the Literary Festival.

Vanessa Cuti

Vanessa Cuti's fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, West Branch, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, and others. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and lives in the suburbs of New York. The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) is her debut novel.

Karen Dukess

Karen Dukess is the author of the novel The Last Book Party, which was a Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers and IndieNext pick. She hosts the Castle Hill Author Talks, a series of in-person and virtual interviews with notable contemporary writers, who have included Gabrielle Zevin, Patrick Radden Keefe, Robert Jones, Jr., Miranda Cowley Heller, and Elizabeth McCracken. She teaches writing at Truro Center for the Arts on Cape Cod and the Wainwright House in Rye, New York. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family in Pelham, New York, and spends as much time as possible in Truro on Cape Cod.

T.M. Dunn

Patricia Dunn (aka T. M. Dunn) is author of Her Father's Daughter (Crooked Lane, July 2023), Last Stop On The 6 (Bordighera Press, 2021,) Rebels By Accident (2014). She has served as Senior Director of the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where she holds an MFA in creative writing. She coaches aspiring and established writers and teaches creative writing workshops. She is a co-founder of Key to the Castle Workshop and the co-host of the Westport Library's podcast, "Go Ahead, Write Something." She lives in Stamford, Connecticut where she is currently working on her next novel, with Blanqui, her rescue puppy and biggest fan, snuggled at her side. TikTok @tmdunnauthor Instagram @patriciadunnauthor

Katherine Dykstra

Katherine Dykstra is the author of WHAT HAPPENED TO PAULA: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood (W.W. Norton), which was on Best Books of Summer lists in the New York Times Book Review, People magazine, and the Chicago Tribune among others. She served as senior nonfiction editor at Guernica for many years and was recently a Writer in Residence at Monmouth University. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Guernica and Poets and Writers among others. She is at work on a novel that takes place in a maternity home in the 1960s.

B.K. Fischer

BK Fischer is the author of Ceive, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, and four other books of poetry—Radioapocrypha, My Lover’s Discourse, St. Rage’s Vault, and Mutiny Gallery. Also the author of Museum Mediations, a critical study of ekphrasis, Fischer has published poems and reviews in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Jacket2, Boston Review, WSQ, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, FIELD, The Account, and elsewhere. She teaches the Comma Sutra in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University and is currently the poet laureate of Westchester County, New York and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. You can find her @bk_on_hudson or www.bkfischer.com.

Lori Fontanes

Lori Fontanes has written stories for various print and digital media on topics ranging from motorsports and poultry to food, the environment and politics. Her first film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and her award-winning documentary, “The Day Arnold Schwarzenegger Kicked My A**” took a comedic look inside her run for governor of California. Lori is also an adjunct professor at Manhattanville College where she received her MFA in Creative Writing. She is currently working on a memoir about the history of bad food in one body—hers.