Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton was an American writer. Many of her novels are set in her home state of California. Her bestselling novel Black Oxen (1923) was made into a silent movie of the same name. In addition to novels, she wrote short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on such issues as feminism, politics, and war.
Diane Johnson, is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living in contemporary France. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988.
Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long, who used the pseudonyms Marjorie Bowen, George R. Preedy, Joseph Shearing, Robert Paye, John Winch, and Margaret Campbell or Mrs. Vere Campbell, was a British author who wrote historical romances and supernatural horror stories, as well as works of popular history and biography.
Lee Smith is an American fiction writer who often incorporates her background from the American South in her works. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Mary Ellen Quinlan; known as Ella O'Neill was the mother of playwright Eugene O'Neill and wife of actor James O'Neill. She was the inspiration for many of Eugene O'Neill's stories.
Gina Berriault, was an American novelist and short story writer.
Alice Adams was an American short story writer and novelist. In 1982 she became the third author of only four to receive the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her short stories.
Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.
Angie Cruz is an American novelist and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches in the M.F.A. program.
Gina Kaus was an Austrian-American novelist and screenwriter.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Valerie Miner is an American novelist, journalist, and professor. A dual US/UK citizen, she lives in San Francisco and Mendocino, California with her partner.
Mary Lou Mackey is an American novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and fourteen novels, including the New York Times best-seller A Grand Passion and The Village of Bones, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, four sweeping historical novels that take as their subject the earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. In 2012, her sixth collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Another collection, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2018, won a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies; and the 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award for the best book published by a small press. Her first novel, Immersion, was the first novel published by a Second Wave feminist press. Long concerned with environmental issues, Mackey frequently writes about the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Brazilian Amazon. In the early 1970s, as Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at California State University, Sacramento, she was instrumental in the founding of the CSUS Women's Studies Program and the CSUS English Department Graduate Creative Writing Program. From 1989-1992, she served as President of the West Coast Branch of PEN American Center involving herself in PEN's international defense of persecuted writers.
The San Francisco Writers Workshop is one of the oldest continuously running writing critique groups in the United States, meeting every Tuesday night, except for major holidays, since 1946. Successful published authors who first workshopped their books in the group include Khaled Hosseini, David Henry Sterry, Aaron Hamburger, Joe Quirk, Michelle Gagnon, Kemble Scott, Tamim Ansary, Erika Mailman, Zack Lynch, Zarina Zabrisky, and Ransom Stephens.
Ella Sterling Mighels was a California pioneer, author and literary historian. She was born in Mormon Island, California, but grew up in the town of Aurora, Esmeralda County, Nevada, leading her to adopt the pen name, "Aurora Esmeralda". She founded the California Literature Society (1913), and was named the "First Literary Historian of California" (1919). She died in San Francisco, and is buried in Oakland, California at the Mountain View Cemetery.
Daphne Kalotay is a novelist and short story writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is known for her novels, Russian Winter and Sight Reading, and her collection of short stories, Calamity and Other Stories, which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize. She is a graduate of Vassar College and holds an MA in creative writing and a PhD in literature from Boston University, where she has also taught. In addition, she has taught at Middlebury College and been a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College and Lynchburg College. From 2014 to 2016 she was the Visiting Writer in English at University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is a citizen of both the United States and Canada. She is currently a lecturer at Princeton University.
Mary Catherine McIntire Pacheco was an American novelist and playwright. The wife of California governor Romualdo Pacheco, she was First Lady of California during her husband's term in 1875.
Philip Verrill Mighels was an American writer and novelist. His early poems, short stories, and several of his novels, including his best-selling Bruvver Jim’s Baby and The Furnace of Gold, are part of the Sagebrush School of American literature. He was also a versatile and prolific author, recognized for his science fiction novels, romances, and political commentary. Less-known are his detective novels.
Jordan Ifueko is a Nigerian American writer of fantasy and young adult fiction. She is best known for her novel Raybearer, which became a New York Times bestseller, and its sequel, Redemptor. She also writes short stories, which have been published in Strange Horizons.
Olive Harper, the alias of Ellen Burrell D'Apery, was an American journalist, writer, and poet. Her novels comprise mystery, detective, and science fiction stories, including AFair Californian (1889), The Show Girl: Or, the Cap of Fortune (1902), and TheSociable Ghost (1903). She also wrote novelizations of various plays, primarily written by Owen Davis, including The Gambler of the West (1906) and King of the Bigamists (1909).
