Tananarive Priscilla Due is an American author and educator. Due won the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood (2001), and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award for her novel The Reformatory (2023). She is also known as a film historian with expertise in Black horror. Due teaches a course at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic", which focuses on the Jordan Peele film Get Out.
Jewell Parker Rhodes is an American bestselling novelist and educator.
Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
Connie Rose Porter is an African-American writer of young-adult books, and a teacher of creative writing. Porter is best known for her contribution to the American Girl Collection Series as the author of the Addy books: six of her Addy books have gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In addition, she published two novels with Houghton-Mifflin, All-Bright Court (1991), and Imani All Mine (1999).
Point Cabrillo Light is a lighthouse in northern California, United States, between Point Arena and Cape Mendocino, just south of the community of Caspar. It has been a federal aid to navigation since 1909. It is part of the California state park system as Point Cabrillo Light Station State Historic Park.
Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 under 35 honoree. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.
Alexandra Flinn is an American writer of novels for young adults. Her books have appeared on the New York Times and USA Today Bestseller lists and have been translated into over twenty foreign languages. Many of her books have made the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults lists, as well as Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. Many of her novels are modernized versions of classic fairy tales.
Elizabeth Tallent is an American fiction writer, academic, and essayist.
Lynne Barrett is an American writer and editor, best known for her short stories.
Sidney Wade is an American poet. She currently holds the position of professor of creative writing at the University of Florida, where she has taught since 1993.
Louise Seaman Bechtel was an American editor, critic, author, and teacher of young children. She was the first person to head a juvenile book department established by an American publishing house.
Barbara Parker was an American mystery writer. She wrote 12 novels, the first of which, Suspicion of Innocence, was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first mystery novel by an American author. Parker was on the national board of the Mystery Writers of America and was the chair of its membership committee for two years.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is an American poet, memoirist, translator, fiction writer and visual artist. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of numerous books, notably Building Fiction, The Museum of Happiness, Space and Underground Women, and she is a translator of Uruguayan poetry.
The Orange Bowl is an annual American college football bowl game that has been played annually in the Miami metropolitan area since January 1, 1935. Along with the Sugar Bowl and the Sun Bowl, it is one of the oldest bowl games in the country behind only the Rose Bowl, which was first played in 1902 and has been played annually since 1916.
Les Standiford is an author and, since 1985, the Founding Director of the Florida International University Creative Writing Program in Miami, Florida. He also holds the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Vicki Due Hendricks is an American author of crime fiction, erotica, and a variety of short stories.
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.
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.
Mere Whaanga is a New Zealand writer, illustrator, historian, researcher and academic whose work includes bilingual picture books, history books and conference papers. Several of her books have been shortlisted for or won awards and she herself has received a number of awards, grants, fellowships and writing residencies. She lives in Māhia, Hawke's Bay.
