James Albert Michener was an American writer. He wrote more than 40 books, most of which were long, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations, set in particular geographic locales and incorporating detailed history. Many of his works were bestsellers and were chosen by the Book of the Month Club; he was known for the meticulous research that went into his books.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University.
Amy Hempel is an American short story writer and journalist. She teaches creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers.
Anthony Swofford is an American writer and former U.S. Marine, best known for his 2003 book Jarhead, based heavily on his accounts of various situations encountered in the Persian Gulf War. This memoir was the basis of the 2005 film of the same name, directed by Sam Mendes.
Elizabeth McCracken is an American author. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is a Chinese American writer. She previously taught writing and literature in the Graduate MFA Writing program at Otis College of Art and Design until 2015. Bynum is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter. Her brother is musician Taylor Ho Bynum.
Atheneum Books was a New York City publishing house established in 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., Simon Michael Bessie and Hiram Haydn. Simon & Schuster has owned Atheneum properties since its acquisition of Macmillan in 1994 and it created Atheneum Books for Young Readers as an imprint for children's books in the 2000s.
Danielle Anne Trussoni is a New York Times, USA Today, and Sunday Times Top 10 bestselling novelist. She has been a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction jurist, and wrote the "Dark Matters" column for the New York Times Book Review for five years, from 2018-2023. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. Her novels have been translated into 33 languages.
Joshua Furst is an American fiction writer. He studied as an undergraduate at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, receiving a BFA in Dramatic Writing in 1993 and did graduate work at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, from which he received an MFA with Honors in 2001.
Andrew J. Porter is an American short story writer.
Nam Le is a Vietnamese-born Australian writer, who won the Dylan Thomas Prize for his book The Boat, a collection of short stories. His stories have been published in many places including Best Australian Stories 2007, Best New American Voices, Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space and One Story. In 2008 he was named a 5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation.
Paul Harding is an American musician and author, best known for his debut novel Tinkers (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2010 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize among other honors. He is currently the director of the Creative Writing and Literature MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, as well as Interim Associate Provost of SUNY-Stony Brook's Lichtenstein Center.
Rebecca Johns is an American author and educator. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri's School of Journalism and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of Icebergs and The Countess. Johns is a member of the DePaul University English Department and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City.
Carol Sklenicka is an American biographer and literary scholar known for her authoritative, full-scale biographies of two important figures in late twentieth-century American literature: acclaimed short story masters Raymond Carver and Alice Adams.
Benjamin Hale is an American novelist based in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised in Boulder, Colorado, where he attended Fairview High School. In 2006, he received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and earned an M.F.A. in 2008 from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received an Iowa Provost's Fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus Award. Since 2013, Hale has taught fiction and literature at Bard College as a Writer in Residence.
Gregory Blake Smith is an American novelist and short story writer. His novel, The Divine Comedy of John Venner, was named a Notable Book of 1992 by The New York Times Book Review and his short story collection The Law of Miracles won the 2010 Juniper Prize for Fiction and the 2012 Minnesota Book Award.
Ron Tanner is writer of fiction and nonfiction and Professor Emeritus of Writing at Loyola University Maryland.
Jonathan Blum is an American writer.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Fatima Farheen Mirza is an American novelist best known for her novel A Place for Us (2018), which was a New York Times Best Seller. She was also honored by the National Book Award Foundation as a "5 Under 35" Honoree in 2020.
