Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued in 2018 that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet.
Henri Cole is an American poet, who has published many collections of poetry and a memoir. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Frederick Seidel is an American poet.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. She was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction.
Charles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States.
David Grossman is an Israeli author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.
Alex Ross is an American music critic and author who specializes in classical music. Ross has been a staff member of The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His extensive writings include performance and record reviews, industry updates, cultural commentary, and historical narratives in the realm of classical music. He has written three well-received books: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Listen to This (2011), and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020).
James Lasdun is an English novelist and poet.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
Vivian Gornick is an American radical feminist critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist.
Mark Gevisser is a South African author and journalist. His latest book is The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers (2020). Previous books include A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream and Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir. His journalism has appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, and the New York Review of Books.
Christian Wiman is an American poet, translator and editor.
Evan Lionel Richard Osnos is an American journalist and author. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008, best known for his coverage of politics and foreign affairs, in the United States and China. His 2014 book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the National Book Award for nonfiction.
James Lord was an American writer. He was the author of several books, including critically acclaimed biographies of Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. He appeared in the documentary films Balthus Through the Looking Glass (1996) and Picasso: Magic, Sex, Death (2001).
Eileen Simpson was an American writer and psychotherapist. Her 1982 book Poets in their Youth records her life with first husband John Berryman and his circle of poets, including Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell. In 1984 she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in General Nonfiction.
