Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month. In total, the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years.
Rabih Alameddine is an American painter and writer. His 2021 novel The Wrong End of the Telescope won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Ursula Hegi is a German-born American writer. She is currently an instructor in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
James Christopher Frey is an American writer and businessman. His first two books, A Million Little Pieces (2003) and My Friend Leonard (2005), were bestsellers marketed as memoirs. Large parts of the stories were later found to be exaggerated or fabricated, sparking a media controversy. His 2008 novel Bright Shiny Morning was also a bestseller.
David Ebershoff is an American writer, editor, and teacher. His debut novel, The Danish Girl, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name in 2015, while his third novel, The 19th Wife, was adapted into a television movie of the same name in 2010.
Robin Wasserman is an American novelist and essayist.
Mary McGarry Morris is an American novelist, short story author and playwright from New England. She uses its towns as settings for her works. In 1991, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described Morris as "one of the most skillful new writers at work in America today"; The Washington Post has described her as a "superb storyteller"; and The Miami Herald has called her "one of our finest American writers".
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.
Oprah Gail Winfrey, known mononymously as Oprah, is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only black billionaire. By 2007, she was often ranked as the most influential woman in the world.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation is an independent charitable arts foundation that supports the art of fiction and encourages readers of all ages. It accomplishes this through a number of programs, including its flagship PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, and a number of educational and public literary programs. Since 1983 the Foundation's administration has been located in Washington, D.C.. The Foundation was established in 1980 by National Book Award winner Mary Lee Settle. Novelist Robert Stone served as the Chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Board of Directors for over thirty years beginning in 1982.
Oprah's Book Club 2.0 is a book club founded June 1, 2012, by Oprah Winfrey in a joint project between OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network and O: The Oprah Magazine. The club is a re-launch of the original Oprah's Book Club, which ran for 15 years and ended in 2011, but as the "2.0" name suggests, digital media is the new focus. It incorporates the use of various social media platforms and e-readers that allow for the quoting and uploading of passages and notes for discussion, among other features.
Cameroonian literature includes literature in French, English and indigenous languages.
Behold the Dreamers is a 2016 debut novel by Imbolo Mbue. The novel details the experiences of two New York City families during the 2008 financial crisis: an immigrant family from Cameroon, the Jonga family, and their wealthy employers, the Edwards family.
The Wangs vs. the World is the debut comic novel by Jade Chang, published in 2016. The novel chronicles the cross-country road trip of Chinese/Taiwanese immigrant Charles Wang and his family to his eldest daughter's house after Wang's bankruptcy in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. As common to immigrant families, dialogue between family members is conducted in a mix of the adopted country's language (English) and native tongue.
How Beautiful We Were is an environmentalist novel written by Cameroonian American author Imbolo Mbue. It is the second novel written by Mbue. Set in a fictional village in Africa, it follows of a set of villagers who challenge the government and an American oil company.
