Cynthia Shoshana Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
David Quammen is an American science, nature, and travel writer and the author of fifteen books. For 15 years he wrote a column called "Natural Acts" for Outside magazine. His articles have also appeared in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals. In 2013, Quammen's book Spillover was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
Rilla Askew is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in Poteau, in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, and grew up in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher. He is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.
Daniel Mendelsohn, is an American memoirist, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator, the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and the Editor at Large of the New York Review of Books. He is also the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction.
David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Jill Lepore is an American historian. She is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.
Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was an English classicist, author, and critic who became an American citizen. He was the first director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. In 1992 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Knox for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.
David B. Morris is a writer and scholar, emeritus professor of literature at the University of Virginia. His main interest is pain and its various manifestations.
Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel is an American preservationist, historian, author, and television producer. She is an advocate for the preservation of the historic built environment. She has worked in the fields of art, architecture, crafts, historic preservation, fashion, and public policy in the U.S. She is the author of 24 books, numerous articles and essays, and recipient of many honors and awards. She is a former White House Assistant, the first Director of Cultural Affairs in New York City, and the longest serving New York City Landmarks Preservation Commissioner.
Mark Slouka is an American novelist and essayist who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He is a frequent contributor to Harper's Magazine.
The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay is awarded by the PEN America to an author for a book of original collected essays. The award was founded by PEN Member and author Barbaralee Diamonstein and Carl Spielvogel, former New York Times columnist, "to preserve the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature." The winner receives a cash award of $10,000.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican author living in the United States. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her most recent book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2020 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Alden Jones is an American writer.
The Girls in My Town: Essays by Angela Morales, published by the University of New Mexico Press, 2016, is the winner of the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Prize, and the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is an American writer who was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She studied English literature at Carleton College and went on to earn an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her essay collection, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013. Her most recent essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, was published in 2017 and chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest.
Jean Carolyn Guerrero is an American investigative journalist, author and former foreign correspondent. She is the author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, winner of the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize, and Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, published in 2020 by William Morrow. Guerrero's KPBS series America’s Wall won an Emmy Award. Her essay "My Father Says He's a 'Targeted Individual.' Maybe We All Are" was selected for The Best American Essays anthology of 2019.
