Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc, which he started with classmate David Filo in 1994.
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
Ivan Doig was an American author and novelist, widely known for his sixteen fiction and non-fiction books set mostly in his native Montana, celebrating the landscape and people of the post-war American West.
Timothy Taylor is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, journalist, and professor of creative writing.
David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, author, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. He also directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience and is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of BrainCheck, a digital cognitive health platform used in medical practices and health systems. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
Glenn Frankel is an American author and academic, and winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He spent 27 years with The Washington Post, where he was bureau chief in Richmond (Va.), Southern Africa, Jerusalem and London, and editor of The Washington PostMagazine. He served as a visiting journalism professor at Stanford University and as Director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Author of four books, his latest works explore the making of an iconic American movie in the context of the historical era it reflects. In 2018 Frankel was named a Motion Picture Academy Film Scholar.
Min Jin Lee is a Korean American author and journalist based in Harlem, New York City. Her work frequently deals with Korean and Korean American topics. She is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017). Lee serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. She is currently writing her third book, American Hagwon, the concluding novel on the Korean Diaspora Trilogy, and her memoir, Name Recognition.
Mark Stanford Oldman is an American entrepreneur, wine expert, and author of several books on wine. Founder of the wine school Bevinars.com, he has been described as "one of the wine world's great populizers" and "one of the wine world's great showmen." He is regularly named the "audience favorite" at major food and wine festivals and does private events for corporations and institutions. He also designed and teaches a course on entrepreneurship for Stanford University.
Douglas A. Blackmon is an American writer and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer. Marra has won numerous awards for his short stories, as well as his first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which was a New York Times best seller.
Daniel Lubetzky is a Mexican American billionaire businessman, philanthropist, author, and founder and executive chairman of snack company Kind LLC.
Craig Lancaster is an American writer and journalist, best known for his novels 600 Hours of Edward, its sequel, Edward Adrift, and The Summer Son. His other notable works include a short story collection as well as numerous articles and essays produced during his career as a newspaper writer and editor. The author was lauded as "one of Montana's most important writers."
Michael W. Punke is an American author, attorney, academic, and policy analyst. He is a former Deputy United States Trade Representative and U.S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2017, he became vice president for public policy at Amazon Web Services.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her debut novel Homegoing, published in 2016, won her, at the age of 26, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020.
Tony Xu is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman and the co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of DoorDash. Born in Nanjing, China, Xu immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of four. He earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Earlier in his career, Xu interned at Square, Inc., and worked for McKinsey & Company, eBay, and PayPal. He was included in Fortune's "40 Under 40" list in 2020.
Abby Jimenez is an American romance novelist and founder of Nadia Cakes. She is the author of the books The Friend Zone (2019), The Happy Ever After Playlist (2020)
Hernan Diaz is a writer. His 2017 novel In the Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He also received a Whiting Award. For his second novel Trust, he was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
