Ruth Reichl is an American chef, food writer and editor. In addition to two decades as a food critic, mainly spent at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, Reichl has also written cookbooks, memoirs and a novel, and has been co-producer of PBS's Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie, culinary editor for the Modern Library, host of PBS's Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. She has won six James Beard Foundation Awards.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is an American historian, writer, professor, and activist based in San Francisco. Born in Texas, she grew up in Oklahoma and is a social justice and feminist activist. She has written numerous books including Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra Years (2005), Red Dirt: Growing up Okie (1992), and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014). She is professor emeritus in Ethnic Studies at California State University.
Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology, which gathers verse that spans from the 17th century to the present day. His memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is the 2015 recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the 2024 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Kristen Iversen is an American writer of nonfiction and fiction. Her books include Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, as well as the anthologies Don't Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn't Seen and Doom with a View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. She is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and Literary Nonfiction Editor of The Cincinnati Review. Iversen was chosen to be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen, Norway in 2020-2021.
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Kiese Laymon is an American writer. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He is the author of three full-length books: a novel, Long Division (2013), and two memoirs, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (2013) and the award-winning Heavy: An American Memoir (2018). Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Esther Belin, who has work published under Esther G. Belin, is a Diné multimedia artist, writer, poet, writing instructor, and addiction counselor. The Before Columbus Foundation chose From the Belly of My Beauty for the American Book Award after the book was published in 1999. She was one of the editors of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature that was published in 2021. It is on the Lists of Best Books, 2010-2023 of the American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL).
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.
Terese Marie Mailhot is a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher.
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. She is a senior journalism fellow at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab.
Heart Berries: A Memoir is the debut book from First Nation Canadian writer Terese Marie Mailhot. It follows Mailhot through her troubled childhood, early and tumultuous motherhood, and into her adult struggles with mental health and personal identity. Maillot's memoir covers many topics relevant to the lives of Indigenous women, including Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. It reached 14 on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardback non-fiction, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. A number of critics have noted, both positively and negatively, the unique style of the piece, yet despite or because of this, it has received a warm reception and overall praise.
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.
Mieke Eerkens is a Dutch-American writer. Her book, All Ships Follow Me., was published by Picador (imprint) in 2019. Her work has been anthologized in W. W. Norton & Company’s Fakes, edited by David Shields; Best Travel Writing 2011; and Outpost 19’s A Book of Uncommon Prayer, among others. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Nonfiction Writing.
T Kira Madden is an American writer. She is the author of a memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of No Tokens Journal. In 2021, she received Lambda Literary's Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers.
Sarah Smarsh is an American journalist and nonfiction writer.
Morgan Jerkins is an American writer and editor. Her debut book, This Will Be My Undoing (2018), a collection of nonfiction essays, was a New York Times bestseller. Her second book, Wandering in Strange Lands, her memoir, was released in August 2020. She is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Grace Talusan is a Filipino American writer. Her 2019 memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction and was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection. Her short story, "The Book of Life and Death," was the Boston Book Festival's One City One Story selection in 2020.
Jenn Shapland is an American writer and archivist. Her essay "Finders, Keepers" won a Pushcart Prize in 2017, and her memoir, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir in 2021.
Whiskey Tender: A Memoir is a 2024 memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa, the director at the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, published by Harper. It was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
