Donald Edwin Westlake was an American writer with more than one hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers, with an occasional foray into science fiction and other genres. Westlake created two professional criminal characters who each starred in a long-running series: the relentless, hardboiled Parker, and John Dortmunder, who featured in a more humorous series.
James McBride is an American writer and musician. He is the recipient of the 2013 National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Good Lord Bird.
Susan Wittig Albert, also known by the pen names Robin Paige and Carolyn Keene, is an American mystery writer from Vermilion County, Illinois, United States. Albert was an academic and the first female vice president of Southwest Texas State University before retiring to become a fulltime writer.
Elinor Lipman is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
The Jewish Book Council, founded in 1943, is an American organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quality English language books of Jewish content in North America". The council sponsors the National Jewish Book Awards, the JBC Network, JBC Book Clubs, the Visiting Scribe series, and Jewish Book Month. It previously sponsored the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It publishes an annual literary journal called Paper Brigade.
Julie Orringer is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestseller, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. The novel inspired the Netflix series Transatlantic.
Tamar Yellin is an English author and teacher who lives in Yorkshire. Her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, won the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History in the department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Joseph Skibell is an American novelist and essayist living in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tesuque, New Mexico.
Lucette Matalon Lagnado was an Egyptian-born American journalist and memoirist of Syrian origin. She was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Sana Krasikov is a writer living in the United States, best known for One More Year (2008) and The Patriots (2017). She grew up in the Republic of Georgia, as well as the United States. She graduated from Cornell University in 2001, living at the Telluride House during her time there, and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2017 she was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2019 The Patriots won France's Prix du Premiere Roman Etranger, an award for best first novel in translation.
Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature is an annual prize awarded to an outstanding literary work of Jewish interest by an emerging writer. Previously administered by the Jewish Book Council, it is now given in association with the National Library of Israel.
Shani Boianjiu is an Israeli author. Her debut novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, was released in 2012, and has been published in 23 countries. In 2011 the National Book Foundation named her a 5 under 35 honoree.
John A. Glusman is vice president and executive editor at W. W. Norton and Company, the largest independent, employee-owned publisher in the United States, and the author of Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945.
Disobedience is the debut novel by British author Naomi Alderman. First published in the UK in March 2006, the novel has since been translated into ten languages. Disobedience follows a rabbi's bisexual daughter as she returns from New York to her Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon, London. Although the subject matter was considered somewhat controversial, the novel was well received and earned Alderman the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers and the 2007 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
Lisa Ko is an American writer. Her debut novel, The Leavers, was a national bestseller, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction. Her short fiction has been published in Best American Short Stories and McSweeney's and her essays in The New York Times and The Believer. Ko's second novel, Memory Piece, was published in 2024.
Daniel Torday is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He serves as an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.
Dahlia Adler is an American author of young adult and new adult fiction.
