Elizabeth Stamatina "Tina" Fey is an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and playwright. She is best known for her work on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live (1997–2006) and for creating the comedy series 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2020). Fey is also known for her work in film, including Mean Girls (2004), Baby Mama (2008), Date Night (2010), Megamind (2010), Muppets Most Wanted (2014), Sisters (2015), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016), Wine Country (2019), and Soul (2020).
Janet Clara Malcolm was an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist. She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), among other books. She wrote frequently about psychoanalysis as well as the relationship of the journalist to subject and was known for her prose style as well as polarizing criticism of her own profession, though her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, became a mainstay of journalism-school curricula.
The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is an American award presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts annually since 1998, excepting the years 2020 and 2021. Named after the 19th-century humorist Mark Twain, it is presented to individuals who have "had an impact on American society in ways similar to" Twain. The JFK Center chose Twain due to his status as a controversial social commentator and his "uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly." A copy of Karl Gerhardt's 1884 bust of Twain is presented in an autumn ceremony at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington, D.C., during which the honoree is celebrated by his or her peers. The event is a significant fundraiser to benefit the Kennedy Center, which sells tickets as well as access to dinners and after-parties featuring the celebrities.
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction examination The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994). She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is also known for allegedly planning to out the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an article for Harper's magazine.
Amy Poehler is an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director. After studying improv at Chicago's Second City and ImprovOlympic in the early 1990s, she co-founded the improvisational-comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade. The group moved to New York City in 1996 where their act became a half-hour sketch-comedy series on Comedy Central in 1998. Along with other members of the comedy group, Poehler is a founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.
Janet R. Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as a Times film critic from 1977 to 1999 and as a book critic from 2000 to 2015. In 2000 Maslin helped found the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. She is president of its board of directors.
30 Rock is an American satirical sitcom television series created by Tina Fey that originally aired on NBC from October 11, 2006, to January 31, 2013. The series, based on Fey's experiences as head writer for Saturday Night Live, takes place behind the scenes of a fictional live sketch comedy show depicted as airing on NBC. The series' name refers to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, the address of the now Comcast Building, where the NBC Studios are located and where Saturday Night Live is written, produced, and performed. The series was produced by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and Fey's Little Stranger, in association with NBCUniversal.
The pilot episode of the American situation comedy series 30 Rock premiered on October 10, 2006, on the CTV Television Network in Canada, and October 11, 2006, on NBC in the United States. The episode was directed by Adam Bernstein and written by Tina Fey, the series' creator, executive producer, and lead actress.
Mean Girls is a 2004 American teen comedy film directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey. The film stars Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer, Amy Poehler, and Fey. It is based in part on Rosalind Wiseman's 2002 non-fiction self-help book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which describes female high school social cliques, school bullying, and the damaging effects they can have on students. Fey also drew from her own experience at Upper Darby High School as an inspiration for some of the concepts in the film. The plot centers on a naïve teenage girl navigating her way through the social hierarchy of a modern American high school after years of her parents homeschooling her while conducting research in Africa.
The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus is a 1993 book about date rape by author and journalist Katie Roiphe. Her first book, it was reprinted with a new introduction in 1994. Part of the book had previously been published as an essay, "The Rape Crisis, or 'Is Dating Dangerous?'" in the New York Times Magazine.
Carole Jane Cadwalladr is a British author, investigative journalist and features writer. She is a features writer for The Observer and formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph. Cadwalladr rose to international prominence in 2018 for her role in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal for which she was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, alongside The New York Times reporters.
The sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live aired several critically acclaimed sketches parodying then Alaskan Governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin in the lead-up to the 2008 United States presidential election. The sketches featured former cast member Tina Fey, who returned as a guest star to portray Palin. Fey won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her impersonation of Palin.
Anne Roiphe is an American writer and journalist. She is best known as a first-generation feminist, and author of the novel Up The Sandbox (1970), which was filmed as a starring vehicle for Barbra Streisand in 1972. In 1996, Salon called the book "a feminist classic."
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia is a 2006 memoir by American author Elizabeth Gilbert. The memoir chronicles the author's trip around the world after her divorce and what she discovered during her travels. The book remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 187 weeks. The film version, which stars Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem, was released in theaters on August 13, 2010.
The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a memoir by U.S. journalist Kim Barker about her experiences reporting in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was published in 2011.
Christine Elaine Montross is an American medical doctor and writer. First a published poet and a high school teacher, she later took up medical studies, and became an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University's Alpert Medical School. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
House of Holes: A Book of Raunch is a 2011 novel by American writer Nicholson Baker. It consists of a series of chapters that are more or less connected which tell of the sexual and emotional experiences of a variety of characters in a kind of sexual fantasy land, the titular "House of Holes". The third "dirty novel" by Baker after Vox and The Fermata, it is praised by many reviewers for the inventiveness of its language.
Today Will Be Different is a comedy novel by Maria Semple. It was first published on October 4, 2016 by Little, Brown and Company. The novel follows a day in the life of Eleanor Flood. A television adaptation of the novel, also written by Semple and starring Julia Roberts, is being developed for HBO.
A Stolen Life: A Memoir is a true crime memoir by American kidnapping victim Jaycee Lee Dugard about the 18 years she spent in captivity in an unincorporated area in Contra Costa County, California. The memoir dissects what she did to survive and cope mentally with extreme abuse. The book reached number 1 on Amazon's sales rankings a day before release and topped The New York Times best seller list hardcover nonfiction for six weeks after release.
