The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
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.
Hoda Kotb is an American broadcast journalist, television personality, and author. She is a main co-anchor of the NBC News morning show Today and co-host of its entertainment-focused fourth hour. Kotb formerly served as a correspondent for the television news magazine program Dateline NBC.
Magda Szabó was a Hungarian novelist. Doctor of philology, she also wrote dramas, essays, studies, memoirs, poetry and children's literature. She was a founding member of the Digital Literary Academy, an online digital repository of Hungarian literature. She is the most translated Hungarian author, with publications in 42 countries and over 30 languages.
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".
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch (2006) and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Tiny Beautiful Things (2012) and Brave Enough (2015). Wild, the story of Strayed's 1995 hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, is an international bestseller and was adapted into the 2014 Academy Award-nominated film Wild.
Sylvie Simmons is a London-born, California-based music journalist, named as a "principal player" in Paul Gorman's book on the history of the rock music press In Their Own Write. A widely regarded writer and rock historian since the late 1970s, she is one of the few women to be included among the predominantly male rock elite. Simmons is the author of a number of books, including biography and cult fiction. Simmons is also a singer-songwriter, ukulele player and recording artist.
Jenna Welch Hager is an American news personality, author, and journalist. She is the co-host of Today with Hoda & Jenna, the fourth hour of NBC's morning news program Today. Hager and her fraternal twin sister, Barbara, are the daughters of the 43rd U.S. President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. Hager is also a granddaughter of the 41st U.S. President George H. W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush, great-granddaughter of former U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, niece of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and first cousin of former Land Commissioner of Texas, George P. Bush.
Today with Hoda & Jenna is an American daytime television talk show on NBC, hosted by Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager. The program airs as the fourth hour of NBC's Today at 10:00 a.m. in all time zones as a "show-within-a-show" with its own hosts, opening sequence, theme music, and website. The Monday through Thursday editions of this portion of the program air live in the Eastern Time Zone and on tape delay elsewhere; the Friday edition is pre-recorded.
Leni Zumas is an American writer from Washington, D.C., who lives in Oregon. She is the author of Red Clocks,The Listeners, and the story collection Farewell Navigator. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in BOMB, The Cut, Granta, Guernica, Portland Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times Style (UK), Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Portland State University.
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.
Jamie Ford is an American author. He is best known for his debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. The book spent 130 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, and was also awarded best "Adult Fiction" book at the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. The book was also named the No. 1 Book Club Pick for Fall 2009/Winter 2010 by the American Booksellers Association.
J. T. Ellison is a New York Times bestselling American author. She writes domestic noir and psychological thrillers, the latter starring Nashville Homicide Lt. Taylor Jackson and medical examiner Dr. Samantha Owens. She also pens the "A Brit in the FBI" series with #1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter. With over a million books in print, Ellison's work has been published in twenty-eight countries and sixteen languages. She is also the co-host of the Emmy Award-winning television series, A Word on Words, which airs on Nashville Public Television. Ellison is also the founder of Two Tales Press, an independent publishing house, and The Wine Vixen, a wine review website. She lives with her husband in Nashville, Tennessee.
Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short-story writer.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda is the award-winning, New York Times and internationally bestselling Canadian author of Secret Daughter, The Golden Son, and The Shape of Family. She lives in California with her family.
Patricia Engel is a Colombian-American writer, professor of creative writing at the University of Miami, and author of five books, including Vida, which was a PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award Finalist and winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, Colombia's national prize in literature. She was the first woman, and Vida the first book in translation, to receive the prize.
Leila Mottley is an American novelist and poet. She is The New York Times bestselling author of Nightcrawling, which was a nominated for numerous awards, including the Booker Prize, making her the youngest author to have been nominated for the award. In 2018, at age 16, she was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California.
Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood is a 2021 memoir by Chinese American lawyer Qian Julie Wang. It was published on September 7, 2021 by Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House. In The New York Times, reviewer Elisabeth Egan described the book as a "powerful story" that "reminds us how lucky we are to have the privileges unlocked by this little blue booklet [United States passport] — and what others risk and endure every day in hopes of getting one too." The book's title derives from the literal translation of the Chinese word for the United States, which means "beautiful country".
Tara Conklin is a New York Times bestselling American author.
