Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah is a British American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, before moving to New York University (NYU) in 2014. He holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU's School of Law. Appiah was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022.
Victor LaValle is an American author. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and five novels, The Ecstatic,Big Machine,The Devil in Silver,The Changeling, and Lone Women. His fantasy-horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for best novella. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
Monique T.D. Truong is a Vietnamese American writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. She has written multiple books, and her first novel, The Book of Salt, was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2003. It was a national bestseller, and was awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. She has also written Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, along with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction.
The William Saroyan International Prize for Writing is a biennial literary award for fiction and nonfiction in the spirit of William Saroyan by emerging writers. It was established by Stanford University Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation to "encourage new or emerging writers rather than recognize established literary figures;" the prize being $12,500.
Blackstone Audio is an independent audiobook publisher in the United States, offering over 25,000 audiobooks. The company is based in Ashland, Oregon, with five in-house recording studios. Blackstone distributes directly to consumers via their subscription e-commerce site, Downpour.com, and to the library market with titles from Blackstone, Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins, Brilliance, BBC, and Disney Press.
Ayad Akhtar is an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter of Pakistani heritage, awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His work has received two Tony Award nominations for Best Play, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Edith Wharton Citation for Merit in Fiction. Akhtar's writing covers various themes including the American-Muslim experience, religion and economics, immigration, and identity. In 2015, The Economist wrote that Akhtar's tales of assimilation "are as essential today as the work of Saul Bellow, James Farrell, and Vladimir Nabokov were in the 20th century in capturing the drama of the immigrant experience."
Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022). Now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the U.S., James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
Kwame Alexander is an American writer of poetry and children's fiction.
Charles David Wendig is an American author, comic book writer, screenwriter, and blogger. He is best known for his online blog Terribleminds, for his 2015 Star Wars novel trilogy Aftermath, the first book of which debuted at No. 4 on The New York Times Best Seller list and No. 4 on USA Today's best seller list, for which series he created the characters of Gallius Rax and marshal Cobb Vanth, the latter of whom would subsequently appear in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Wendig has additionally written comics for Dark Circle Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Marvel Comics, and VS Comics.
Literary Hub is a daily literary website that was launched in 2015 by Grove Atlantic president and publisher Morgan Entrekin, American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame editor Terry McDonell, and Electric Literature founder Andy Hunter.
The Hate U Give is a 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas. It is Thomas's debut novel, expanded from a short story she wrote in college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant. The book is narrated by Starr Carter, a 16-year-old African-American girl from a poor neighborhood who attends an elite private school in a predominantly white, affluent part of the city. Starr becomes entangled in a national news story after she witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil. She speaks up about the shooting in increasingly public ways, and social tensions culminate in a riot after a grand jury decides not to indict the police officer for the shooting.
Jason Reynolds is an American author of novels and poetry for young adult and middle-grade audience. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland, Reynolds found inspiration in rap and had an early focus on poetry, publishing several poetry collections before his first novel in 2014, When I Was The Greatest, which won the John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Anna-Marie McLemore is a Mexican-American author of young adult fiction magical realism, best known for their Stonewall Honor-winning novel When the Moon Was Ours, Wild Beauty, and The Weight of Feathers.
Ibi Aanu Zoboi is a Haitian-American author of young adult fiction. She is best known for her young adult novel American Street, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young Adult's Literature in 2017.
Akil Kumarasamy is an American author and an assistant professor in the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences-Newark. Her collection of short stories Half Gods won The Story Prize Spotlight Award and the 2021–2022 Annual Bard Fiction Prize. Her novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea was released in August 2022.
The Tristan Strong series is a mythology book trilogy written by Kwame Mbalia. The series currently consists of three books. The first book, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, was published on October 15, 2019, and the second installment, Tristan Strong Destroys the World, was released a year later on October 6, 2020. Book three, the last in the trilogy, Tristan Strong Keeps Punching, was announced on February 8, 2021, and released on October 5, 2021. All three books are about African-American folktales.
My Heart is a Chainsaw is a 2021 horror novel by Stephen Graham Jones and the first book in The Indian Lake Trilogy. The book is the winner of the 2021 Bram Stoker Award for Novel. It received critical praise for its references to, and deconstruction of, the slasher film genre.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is an American speculative fiction author who wrote the short story collection Friday Black (2018) and his debut novel Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023). He was named one of "5 under 35 Authors" by the National Book Foundation in 2018 and won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award in 2019. Chain-Gang All-Stars was shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction and The New York Times named it one of the ten best books of 2023.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is a 2023 novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, as well as other awards.
