Annie Hall is a 1977 American romantic comedy film directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay he co-wrote with Marshall Brickman, and produced by Allen's manager, Charles H. Joffe. The film stars Allen as Alvy Singer, who tries to figure out the reasons for the failure of his relationship with the eponymous female lead, played by Diane Keaton in a role written specifically for her.
Henry James was an American author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
Carl Reiner was an American actor, comedian, director, screenwriter, and author whose career spanned seven decades. During the early years of television comedy from 1950 to 1957, he acted on and contributed sketch material for Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, starring Sid Caesar, writing alongside Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. Reiner teamed up with Brooks and together they released several iconic comedy albums beginning with the 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (1960). Reiner was best known as the creator and producer of, and a writer and actor on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1965).
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent modernist writer who was born and brought up in New Zealand. She wrote short stories and poetry under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, she left colonial New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917 and she died in France aged 34.
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.
Josephine Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Philip Roth described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English", while a former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation".
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.
Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
Ronald Owen Perelman is an American banker, businessman and investor. MacAndrews & Forbes Incorporated, his company, has invested in companies with interests in groceries, cigars, licorice, makeup, cars, photography, television, camping supplies, security, gaming, jewelry, banks, and comic book publishing. Perelman holds significant shares in companies such as Deluxe Entertainment, Revlon, SIGA Technologies RetailMeNot, Merisant, Scantron, Scientific Games Corporation, Valassis, vTv Therapeutics and Harland Clarke. He previously owned a majority of shares in AM General, but in 2020 sold the majority of his shares in AM General along with significant works of art, in light of the impact of the economy on the high debt burdens many of his companies have from leveraged buyouts. In early 2020, Revlon, acquired by Perelman in the 1980s, undertook a debt deal. Previously worth 19.8 billion in 2018, Perelman is, as of September 2020, worth 4.3 billion.
Suzette Haden Elgin was an American researcher in experimental linguistics, construction and evolution of languages and poetry and science fiction writer. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Her best-known non-fiction includes her Verbal Self-Defense series.
Ursula Vernon is an American freelance writer, artist and illustrator. She is best known for her Hugo Award-winning graphic novel Digger (2003–2011) and for the children's books series Hamster Princess and Dragonbreath. Vernon is the creator of The Biting Pear of Salamanca, a digital work of art which became an internet meme in the form of the LOL WUT pear. Under the name T. Kingfisher, she is also the author of several books for older audiences. She also writes short fiction under both names. She has won awards, including the Hugo Award, Nebula Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, for her work in various mediums.
Paula Gunn Allen was a Native American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Native American, and Arab-American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo and childhood years. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction poetry and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works and wrote two biographies of Native American women.
Patricia Barber Polacco is an American author and illustrator. Throughout her school years, Polacco struggled with reading but found relief by expressing herself through art. Polacco endured teasing and hid her disability until a school teacher recognized that she could not read and began to help her. Her book Thank You, Mr. Falker is Polacco's retelling of this encounter and its outcome. She also wrote such books as Mr. Lincoln's Way and The Lemonade Club.
Misery is a 1990 American psychological thriller film directed by Rob Reiner based on Stephen King's 1987 novel of the same name, starring James Caan, Kathy Bates, Lauren Bacall, Richard Farnsworth, and Frances Sternhagen about an obsessive fan who holds an author captive and forces him to write a story.
You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again is a book published in January 1996 which describes the stories of three prostitutes and one actress about their sexual encounters with various Hollywood celebrities. The sisters Robin Greer and Liza Greer are contributors, along with Linda Hammond and Alexandra D. Datig, identified in the book as "Tiffany". The book generated extensive notoriety and sales, and was also the subject of a low-budget documentary.
Carol Muske-Dukes is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and professor, and the former poet laureate of California (2008–2011). Her most recent book of poetry, Sparrow, chronicling the love and loss of Muske-Dukes’ late husband, actor David Dukes, was a National Book Award finalist.
Annie Shepherd Swan, CBE was a Scottish journalist and fiction writer, who wrote mainly under her maiden name, but also as David Lyall and later Mrs Burnett Smith. As a writer of romantic fiction for women, she published over 200 novels, serials, stories and other fiction between 1878 and her death in 1943. She has been called "one of the most commercially successful popular novelists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". Swan was politically active during the First World War, as a suffragist, a Liberal activist, and a founder-member and vice-president of the Scottish National Party.
Valerie Martínez is an American poet, educator, arts administrator, and collaborative artist.
Brenda Wong Aoki is an American playwright, actor and storyteller. She creates monodramas rooted in traditional storytelling, dance movement, and music. Aoki's work combines Eastern and Western narratives and theatrical traditions such as noh, kyogen, commedia dell'arte, modern dance, Japanese drumming, and American jazz. Most of her performances express themes of history, mixed race, home, gender, and mythology. Aoki is a founding faculty member of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. Aoki and her husband Mark Izu, an Emmy-winning jazz music composer, are the founders of First Voice, a San Francisco-based nonprofit arts organization.
Masque of the Red Death is a 1989 American horror film produced by Roger Corman, and directed by Larry Brand, starring Adrian Paul and Patrick Macnee. The film is a remake of the 1964 picture of the same name which was directed by Roger Corman. The screenplay, written by Daryl Haney and Larry Brand, is based upon the classic 1842 short story of the same name by American author Edgar Allan Poe, concerning the exploits of Prince Prospero, who organizes a bal masqué in his castle while the peasants of his fiefdom die from the plague in great numbers.
