Homer Hadley Hickam Jr. is an American author, Vietnam War veteran, and a former NASA engineer who trained the first Japanese astronauts. His 1998 memoir Rocket Boys was a New York Times Best Seller and was the basis for the 1999 film October Sky. Hickam's body of written work also includes several additional best-selling memoirs and novels, including the "Josh Thurlow" historical fiction novels, his 2015 best-selling Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of a Man, his Wife, and her Alligator and in 2021 the sequel to Rocket Boys titled Don't Blow Yourself Up: The Further Adventures and Travails of the Rocket Boy of October Sky. His books have been translated into many languages.
Sarah Dessen is an American novelist who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Born in Illinois, Dessen graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her first book, That Summer, was published in 1996. She has since published more than a dozen other novels and novellas. In 2017, Dessen won the Margaret Edwards Award for some of her work. Two of her books were adapted into the 2003 film How to Deal.
Dani Shapiro is an American writer, the author of six novels including Family History (2003), Black & White (2007) and most recently Signal Fires (2022) and the best-selling memoirs Slow Motion (1998), Devotion (2010), Hourglass (2017), and Inheritance (2019). She has also written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and Elle. In February 2019, she created an original podcast on iHeart Radio called Family Secrets.
Vera Nazarian is an Armenian-Russian American writer of fantasy, science fiction and other "wonder fiction" including Mythpunk, an artist, and the publisher of Norilana Books. She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and the author of ten novels, including Dreams of the Compass Rose, a "collage" novel structured as a series of related and interlinked stories similar in arabesque flavor to The One Thousand and One Nights, Lords of Rainbow, a standalone epic fantasy about a world without color, the Cobweb Bride trilogy, and The Atlantis Grail books.
Mike D'Orso is an American author and journalist based in Norfolk, Virginia.
The Almost Moon is the third book and the second novel by the American author Alice Sebold, author of the memoir, Lucky and the best-selling novel The Lovely Bones.The Almost Moon was released by Little, Brown and Company in the United States on October 16, 2007.
Janice Erlbaum is an American author. She is the author of two memoirs, GirlBomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir and Have You Found Her: A Memoir., and one novel for adults, "I, Liar." She is also the author of two books for tweens, Lucky Little Things and Let Me Fix That for You. Her poetry and prose have been featured in anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, The Best American Erotic Poems From 1800 to the Present, and Verses that Hurt.
Darren Shawn Greer is a Canadian writer.
Betsy Warland is a Canadian feminist writer, and the author of a dozen books of poetry, creative nonfiction, and lyric prose. She is most widely known for her collection of essays, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (2010).
Danila Botha is a Canadian author and novelist. She has published two short story collections, with a third to be published in 2024 and two novels, with the second to be published in 2025.
Susan Shapiro is the American author of 17 books, including The Byline Bible,Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Only as Good as Your Word, Lighting Up, Speed Shrinking, and What's Never Said, and coauthor of The Bosnia List and the New York Times bestseller Unhooked.
Maggie de Vries, born in 1961 in Ontario, Canada is a writer for children, teens and adults and creative writing instructor. Her 2010 book, Hunger Journeys and her 2015 book Rabbit Ears both won the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize.
Sonia Pilcer is an American author, playwright, and poet, best known for her semi-autobiographical novels Teen Angel and The Holocaust Kid. She is responsible for coining the term "2G" to refer to Second Generation Holocaust survivors in a 1990 essay of the same name for 7 Days magazine.
Dwight "D." Watkins is a bestselling author, HBO writer, and lecturer at The University of Baltimore.
Catherine Hiller is an American author and filmmaker, best known for writing Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir. The first memoir about long-term cannabis use designed for a mainstream audience, Just Say Yes attracted national attention, being featured in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Marie Claire magazine among other media outlets. In 2015, Hiller publicly "came out" as a cannabis user, saying that she has smoked marijuana almost every day for fifty years.
Dean Kuipers is an American journalist and author. He is best known for his writing on the environment. His book Burning Rainbow Farm was selected as a 2007 Michigan Notable Book. His other prominent work includes Operation Bite Back, a non-fiction book about activist Rod Coronado and the use of domestic terrorism charges against environmentalists in the United States.
Wayétu Moore is a Liberian-American author and social entrepreneur. Her debut novel, She Would Be King, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2018, and was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. The novel was positively reviewed by Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Moore has published work in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, The Atlantic, and other journals. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction in 2019. Moore's memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, was named a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazine 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, and a Publishers Weekly Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2020. In 2011, Moore founded a publishing house and nonprofit organization, One Moore Book, which publishes and distributes books intended for children in countries underrepresented in literature.
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.
Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), Drag Queen Storytime, Drag Story Time, and Drag Story Hour are children's events first started in 2015 by author and activist Michelle Tea in San Francisco with the goals of promoting reading and diversity. The events, usually geared for children aged 3–11, are hosted by drag queens who read children’s books, and engage in other learning activities in public libraries. The DSH concept is seen as unconventional as the libraries are usually more reserved, and the queens traditionally are associated with bars and nightlife.
Christa Parravani is an author and assistant professor in creative non-fiction at West Virginia University.
