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I woke up the next morning and a character was forming: a super-human baller who could do the things I never could. I started writing the story then, but truthfully I’d been prepping it my whole life; he could be the half-god I never was.

It was very meaningful to revisit [The Great Gatsby] in the depth of the pandemic, in my 30s…The story takes place after the end of a World War and after a pandemic that killed a third of the world’s population, mostly young people. I understood the kind of feral hunger of the parties and everybody trying to pursue meaning to make up for the death and destruction they had witnessed.

I had been living as a white Midwestern woman for 50 years and 10 months until one weekend, I crossed a line: After seven months on testosterone, I checked in at the Hotel Chandler in Midtown Manhattan around 6 p.m. “Good evening, sir. How are you?” the receptionist asked me. This wasn’t my first “sir,” but it was the one that began my new life. On March 16, 2017, I became a man.

My way of entering politics is through life. The story doesn’t talk about legislation or include protests. Rather, it tells a human story about relationships, what happens when people change, when a marriage is upended by something no one could prepare for. It’s a play about living, and trans people deserve to live a life in all of its complexities.

Along with its star [America Ferrera], Real Women Have Curves has become iconic…It is, of course, beloved by Latinas, many of whom saw themselves for the first time in the film…Indeed, Real Women Have Curves touches on lots of big issues in the Latinx community—religion, acculturation, education, sex—and it was particularly groundbreaking in how it portrays and talks about bodies.

Though Evita first debuted in 1978, Cannold felt it had new relevance, especially given how the women’s movement has evolved in the decades since: “It’s a woman taking back her story after a man has told it for the entire time.”

Like its author, “The Half God of Rainfall” is hard to put in a neat little box: It is an epic poem about Greek and Yoruba deities, as well as the half-god son of Zeus whose special power is killing it at basketball.