Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sanaz Toossi to Join WIT Literary Festival Conversation

The Authors Guild Foundation will present Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Purpose) and Sanaz Toossi (English) in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Vinson Cunningham as part of the 2025 WIT Literary Festival. Taking place in the Berkshires and livestreamed nationwide, the event will explore the role of theater, language, and representation in shaping cultural identity. Registration is now open with discount code WITFRIEND.

This year’s festival theme, The Power of Words: Authors & Activism, centers on the ways writers engage with civic life and social change. Jacobs-Jenkins and Toossi will discuss their paths into theater, the intersection of performance and history, and how universal themes such as representation and displacement have shaped their work.

Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play, tells the story of a Chicago family reckoning with the legacy of its Civil Rights-era patriarch. Toossi’s English, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize and an Obie Award for Best New American Play, follows Iranian adults in an English-language classroom, examining how learning a new language can reshape identity.

Jacobs-Jenkins shared, “Every amazing moment in playwriting is linked to a revelation in acting.” Toossi added during English’s Broadway run: “I am the daughter of two immigrants. It’s why I wrote the show, and it’s been my artistic North Star—to write us with dignity.”

Cunningham, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in criticism and longtime New Yorker theater writer, will moderate the discussion.

About the WIT Literary Festival

The WIT Literary Festival brings together writers and readers for a weekend of timely conversations in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Guided by its mission to celebrate free expression as essential to democracy, the 2025 festival asks: Who are we? What do we believe? In what kind of country do we want to live?