Jonathan Weiner is an American writer of non-fiction books based on his biological observations, focusing particularly on evolution in the Galápagos Islands, genetics, and the environment.
George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings about U.S. foreign policy for The New Yorker and The Atlantic and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. His latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, was released in June 2021.
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Linda Alouise Gregg was an American poet.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Stacey D'Erasmo is an American author and literary critic.
Vijay Seshadri is an American poet, essayist and literary critic based in Brooklyn.
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
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, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Sarah Manguso is an American writer and poet. In 2007, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was named an "Editors’ Choice" title by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and a 2008 "Best Nonfiction Book of the Year" by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015) was also named a New York Times "Editors’ Choice." Her debut novel, Very Cold People, was published by Penguin in 2022.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Andrea Elliott is an American journalist and a staff writer for The New York Times. She is the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in both Journalism (2007) and Letters (2022). She received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series of articles on an Egyptian-born imam living in Brooklyn and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, a book about Dasani, a young girl enduring homelessness in New York City.
Carmen Giménez, also known as Carmen Giménez Smith, is an American poet, writer, and editor.
T. J. Stiles is an American biographer who lives in Berkeley, California. His book The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt won a National Book Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His book Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History.
John D'Agata is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay". He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame", and "About a Mountain".
Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022.
Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer. She is the author of The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and in 2017, Granta Magazine named her to its decennial list of the Best of Young American Novelists.
The Collected Schizophrenias is a 2019 collection of essays by Esmé Weijun Wang. Published by Graywolf Press, it won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, as well as the Whiting Award for Nonfiction.
