March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women

Kate Bolick's first book, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, is a distant descendant of Louisa May Alcott's writings about the single life. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at New York University, but her heart remains in her hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, not far from where Little Women was born.

Jenny Zhang, a writer and poet based in New York City, is the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and the story collection Sour Heart. She is the recipient of the Pen/Bingham Award for Debut Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, works of nonfiction, and books for young adults, including A Thousand Acres and the Last Hundred Years trilogy, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Actress and director Cassandra Campbell has narrated nearly two hundred audiobooks and has received multiple Audie Awards and more than twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman.