Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Debra Jean Williams, better known under her former married name of Debra Lafave, is a convicted sex offender who formerly taught at Angelo L. Greco Middle School in Temple Terrace, Florida. In 2005, she pleaded guilty to lewd or lascivious battery against a teenager. The charges stemmed from a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old student in mid-2004. Lafave's plea bargain included no prison time, opting for three years of house arrest due to safety concerns, seven years of probation, and lifetime registration as a sex offender.
Nnedimma Nkemdili "Nnedi" Okorafor is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. She is best known for her Binti Series and her novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control. She has also written for comics and film.
James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Deb Caletti is an American writer of young adult and adult fiction. Caletti is a National Book Award finalist, and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book medalist, as well as the recipient of other numerous awards including the PEN USA finalist award, the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and SLJ Best Book award. Caletti's books feature the Pacific Northwest, and her young adult work is popular for tackling difficult issues typically reserved for adult fiction. Her first adult fiction novel, He's Gone, was published by Random House in 2013, and was followed by several other books for adults, in addition to her many books for teens.
Gillian Schieber Flynn is an American author, screenwriter, and producer. She is known for writing the thriller and mystery novels Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009), and Gone Girl (2012), which are all critically acclaimed. Her books have been published in 40 languages, and according to The Washington Post, as of 2016 Gone Girl alone has sold more than 15 million copies.
Kerry Isabelle Greenwood is an Australian author and lawyer. She has written many plays and books, most notably a string of historical detective novels centred on the character of Phryne Fisher, which was adapted as the popular television series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. She writes mysteries, science-fiction, historical fiction, children's stories, and plays. Greenwood earned the Australian women's crime fiction Davitt Award in 2002 for her young adult novel The Three-Pronged Dagger.
Margaret Stiefvater is an American writer of young adult fiction. She is best known for her fantasy series The Wolves of Mercy Falls and The Raven Cycle.
Rita Ciresi is an American short story writer and novelist. She is the author of three award-winning novels that address the Italian-American experience.
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is the debut short story collection of author Alissa Nutting, winner of the Sixth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. The book was a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist, as well as an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist for thought-provoking texts.
Madeline Miller is an American novelist, author of The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018). Miller spent ten years writing The Song of Achilles while she worked as a teacher of Latin and Greek. The novel tells the story of the love between the mythological figures Achilles and Patroclus; it won the Orange Prize for Fiction, making Miller the fourth debut novelist to win the prize. She is a 2019 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Dean Bakopoulos is an American writer. He is a two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and writer-in-residence at Grinnell College. Bakopoulos has a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a faculty member in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Aimee Parkison is an American writer known for experimental, lyrical, feminist fiction. She has won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize as well as the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize and has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Oklahoma State University.
Tampa is the debut novel by author Alissa Nutting, in which middle school teacher Celeste Price recounts her molestation of Jack Patrick, her fourteen-year-old student.
Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian novelist and essayist. She has written six novels, including Station Eleven (2014), The Glass Hotel (2020), and Sea of Tranquility (2022). Station Eleven, which has been translated into 33 languages, has been adapted into a limited series on HBO Max. The Glass Hotel was translated into twenty languages and was selected by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020. Sea of Tranquility was published in April 2022 and debuted at number three on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
Elizabeth Acevedo is a Dominican-American poet and author. In September 2022, the Poetry Foundation named her the year's Young People's Poet Laureate.
Made for Love is an American science fiction black comedy-drama television series based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Alissa Nutting. The series premiered on HBO Max on April 1, 2021. It stars Cristin Milioti, Billy Magnussen, and Ray Romano. In June 2021, the series was renewed for a second season which premiered on April 28, 2022. Despite positive response to the series, in June 2022, the series was canceled after two seasons following the merger of HBO Max's parent company WarnerMedia with Discovery, Inc. to become Warner Bros. Discovery. It was removed from HBO Max in December 2022.
Suzumi Suzuki is a Japanese writer and former adult video actress. Since publishing her first book, a sociological study of actresses working in pornographic films, she has produced both non-fiction and fiction works. Suzuki's autobiographical book If You Sell Your Body, Then Goodbye! was adapted into a 2017 Eiji Uchida film. Her novel Gifted was nominated for the 167th Akutagawa Prize, and her novel Graceless was nominated for the 168th Akutagawa Prize.
