Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Sister Souljah is an American author, activist, rapper and film producer. Democratic Party candidate Bill Clinton criticized her remarks about race in the United States during the 1992 presidential campaign. His repudiation of her comments led to what is now known in American politics as a Sister Souljah moment.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month. In total, the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years.
Ursula Hegi is a German-born American writer. She is currently an instructor in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Lynn Whitfield is an American actress. She began her acting career in television and theatre before progressing to supporting roles in film. She won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie and received a Golden Globe Award nomination for her breakout performance as Josephine Baker in the HBO biographical film The Josephine Baker Story (1991).
Elizabeth Murray is an American memoirist and inspirational speaker who is notable for having been accepted by Harvard University despite being homeless in her high school years. Her life story was chronicled in Lifetime's television film Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story (2003). Murray's memoir Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard, published in 2010 is a New York Times Bestseller.
Vinegar Hill is a 1994 novel by A. Manette Ansay. It was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection in November 1999. It was adapted as a television film in 2005, starring Mary-Louise Parker and Tom Skerritt.
Sheri Reynolds is an author of contemporary Southern fiction.
Jane Hamilton is an American novelist.
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch (2006) and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Tiny Beautiful Things (2012) and Brave Enough (2015). Wild, the story of Strayed’s 1995 hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, is an international bestseller and was adapted into the 2014 Academy Award-nominated film Wild.
Oprah Gail Winfrey is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only black billionaire. By 2007, she was often ranked as the most influential woman in the world.
Oprah's Book Club 2.0 is a book club founded June 1, 2012, by Oprah Winfrey in a joint project between OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network and O: The Oprah Magazine. The club is a re-launch of the original Oprah's Book Club, which ran for 15 years and ended in 2011, but as the "2.0" name suggests, digital media is the new focus. It incorporates the use of various social media platforms and e-readers that allow for the quoting and uploading of passages and notes for discussion, among other features.
Port Washington High School is a public secondary high school in the city of Port Washington, Wisconsin and a part of the Port Washington-Saukville School District. The enrollment during the 2022–2023 school year was 825.
Glennon Doyle is an American author and queer activist known for her books Untamed,Love Warrior, and Carry On, Warrior. Doyle is also the creator of the online community Momastery, and is the founder and president of Together Rising, an all-women-led nonprofit organization supporting women, families, and children in crisis.
Breena Clarke is an African-American scholar and writer of fiction, including an award-winning debut novel River, Cross My Heart (1999). She is the younger sister of poet, essayist, and activist Cheryl Clarke, with whom she organizes the Hobart Festival of Women Writers each summer.
Yvonne Anuli Orji is an American-Nigerian actress and comedian. She is best known for her role in the television series Insecure (2016–2021), for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and three NAACP Image Awards.
Imbolo Mbue is a Cameroonian-American novelist and short-story writer based in New York City. She is known for her debut novel Behold the Dreamers (2016), which has garnered her the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Award. Her works draw from her own experiences as an immigrant, as well as the experiences of other immigrants.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an American poet and novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She has published five collections of poetry and a novel. Her 2020 collection The Age of Phillis reexamines the life of American poet Phillis Wheatley, based on years of archival research; it was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and she was the recipient in 2021 of a United States Artists fellowship. She published her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, in 2021.
