Episode #13: "It's a Weird and Broken 'Looking'"
On this episode, we're excited to bring you Peter Parnell and Rachel Cohen
Peter Parnell’s plays have been produced by Lincoln Center Theater Company, Playwrights Horizons, the Public Theater, the Atlantic Theater Company, as well as the Seattle Rep, the Mark Taper Forum, and Trinity Rep. He wrote the new book for the Broadway revival of Lerner and Lane’s On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, and his play QED starring Alan Alda as physicist Richard Feynman was present by the Lincoln Center Theater Company on Broadway. For Disney Theatrical, Parnell wrote the book for the Alan Menken-Stephen Schwartz musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and his two-part stage adaptation of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules won the American Theatre Critics Association Award.
In addition to other TV shows, Parnell was a co-producer for The West Wing (two Emmy Award® citations). His children’s book And Tango Makes Three, co-authored with his husband Justin Richardson, was an American Library Association Notable Book, a Henry Bergh Award winner, a Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year, and has been translated into a dozen languages.
Parnell is working with the Writers Guild Initiative, PEN America and the American Library Association to fight book bans, and is a member of Authors Against Book Bans. Parnell served as Vice-President of the Dramatists Guild from 2009-2015. In 2025, he was given the Flora Roberts Award for his playwriting from the Dramatists Guild, and was co-recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Bravery in Literature.
Rachel Cohen is the author of Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, and A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, reissued by New York Review of Books Classics in 2024. Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the NYRB, the Believer, The Yale Review, and Best American Essays, among others. A recipient of the Berlin Prize, Cohen is a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2026, researching her next book Time in Pieces: Artists at Work. She is Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago.
Read Along!
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And Tango Makes Three is the bestselling, heartwarming true story of two penguins who create a nontraditional family.
At the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, two penguins named Roy and Silo were a little bit different from the others. But their desire for a family was the same. And with the help of a kindly zookeeper, Roy and Silo get the chance to welcome a baby penguin of their very own.
Selected as an ALA Notable Children’s Book Nominee and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, “this joyful story about the meaning of family is a must for any library” (School Library Journal, starred review).
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Weaving a tapestry of creativity and circumstance, this lauded chronicle of the many links and serendipitous meetings between giants of American culture—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein to Zora Neale Hurston to Marcel Duchamp—now includes a new afterword by the author.
Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting is a dazzling group portrait that offers a striking new vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. How does the happenstance of daily life become history? Cohen shows us, describing a series of, now boldly, now subtly, transformative encounters between a wide and surprising range of Americans. A young Henry James has his portrait taken by the photographer Mathew Brady—Brady, who will receive Walt Whitman in his studio and depict General Grant on the battlefield. Later, W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit Helen Keller; Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography; and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together. Throughout, Cohen’s narrative loops back and leaps forward with supreme agility, connecting, among others, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, and Richard Avedon. In A Chance Meeting, Rachel Cohen offers an abiding account of the continuing challenges and the astonishing achievements of American life.
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