Dinah has played countless roles on stage and television, among them Murphy Brown’s Secretary number three, Eileen/Abraham on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a nun with a gun on Sons of Anarchy, ER’s no-nonsense Nurse Shirley, Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude (in Hamlet), and also his Lady Macbeth (of course). She’s a graduate of Yale, where she didn’t study theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she did, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she eventually joined the core faculty to teach literary nonfiction for almost two decades. Dinah’s taught writing and acting in schools all over the country, and co-wrote Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli. The author of two memoirs, The Object Parade and Bigger than Life (excerpted for the “Lives” column in The New York Times Magazine), Dinah served as a long-time nonfiction editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Her latest book, Coffee, was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Dinah lives (reads, writes, grinds, brews—in a Chemex, by the way) with her husband in Echo Park.