Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honor posthumously.
The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is supposedly semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à clef because the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's experiences with what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder. Plath died by suicide a month after its first United Kingdom publication.
Joyce Maynard is an American novelist and journalist. She began her career in journalism in the 1970s, writing for several publications, most notably Seventeen magazine and The New York Times. Maynard contributed to Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazines in the 1980s, while also beginning a career as a novelist with the publication of her first novel, Baby Love (1981). Her second novel, To Die For (1992), drew on the Pamela Smart murder case and was adapted by Gus Van Sant into the film To Die For in 1995. Maynard received significant media attention in 1998 with the publication of her memoir At Home in the World, in which she describes her relationship with J. D. Salinger.
Françoise Sagan was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters. Her best-known novel was her first, Bonjour Tristesse (1954), which was written when she was a teenager.
Dame Anna Wintour is a British-American media executive, who has been serving as editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988. Wintour has also served as Global Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast since 2020, where she oversees all Condé Nast publications worldwide, and concurrently serves as Artistic Director. Wintour is also Global Editorial Director of Vogue. With her trademark pageboy bob haircut and dark sunglasses, Wintour is regarded as the most powerful woman in publishing, and has become an important figure in the fashion world, serving as the lead chairperson of the annual haute couture Met Gala global fashion spectacle in Manhattan since the 1990s. Wintour is praised for her skill in identifying emerging fashion trends, but has been criticised for her reportedly aloof and demanding personality.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Mademoiselle was a women's magazine first published in 1935 by Street & Smith and later acquired by Condé Nast Publications.
Vittoria Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson is an American actress and model. She appeared on the front covers of Vogue and Time, and won the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Natalia Landauer in the 1972 film Cabaret. The role also earned her Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations. Her other film appearances include Death in Venice (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), S.O.B. (1981), and I Am Love (2009).
Sibylle Aimée Marie-Antoinette Gabrielle de Riquetti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville was a French writer who wrote under the pseudonym Gyp.
Jill Eisenstadt is an American novelist, screenwriter, teacher and freelance journalist.
Patricia Bosworth was an American journalist, biographer, memoirist, and actress. She was a faculty member of Columbia University’s school of journalism as well as Barnard College, and was a winner of the Front Page Award for her journalistic achievement in writing about the Hollywood Blacklist.
Betty Ellen Fussell is an American writer and is the author of 12 books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. Over the last 50 years, her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Vogue, Food & Wine, Metropolitan Home and Gastronomica. Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is Eat Live Love Die, and she is now working on How to Cook a Coyote: A Manual of Survival.
"Mad Girl's Love Song" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath in villanelle form that was published in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle, a New York based magazine geared toward young women. The poem explores a young woman's struggle between memory and madness. She wrote this poem as a third-year undergraduate at Smith College and described it as being one of her favorite poems that she had written. However, the poem was never republished or found in any of Plath's later collections during her lifetime. After her suicide, "Mad Girl's Love Song" appeared in the afterword of the reprint of The Bell Jar.
Doris M. Grumbach was an American novelist, memoirist, biographer, literary critic, and essayist. She taught at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and American University in Washington, D.C., and was literary editor of The New Republic for several years. She published many novels highlighting and focusing on gay and lesbian characters. For two decades, she and her partner, Sybil Pike, operated a bookstore, Wayward Books, in Sargentville, Maine.
Ann Packer is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the recipient of a James Michener Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
Janice Kaplan is an American novelist, magazine editor, and television producer. Kaplan served as the Editor-in-Chief of Parade magazine (2007–2010), the Sunday newspaper supplement with a circulation of 32 million. Kaplan is the author of fifteen books and hosts a podcast about gratitude.
Jean Edna Karl was an American book editor who specialized in children's and science fiction titles. She founded and led the children's division and young adult and science fiction imprints at Atheneum Books, where she oversaw or edited books that won two Caldecott Medals and five Newbery Medals. One of the Newberys went to the new writer E. L. Konigsburg in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Betsy Talbot Blackwell was an editor of several women's magazines, best known for being the editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle from 1937 to 1971. Under her leadership, sales surged to nearly one million by the time she retired. In 1970, amidst the burgeoning women's liberation movement, Blackwell published an issue titled "The New Sex," paying tribute to the rise of the individualistic American woman, and she was one of the first editors to publish Gloria Steinem.
Joanna Rakoff is an American novelist and memoirist.
Cyrilly Abels was an American editor and literary agent.
