Marcia Gay Harden is an American actress. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a Tony Award, and nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards.
Padma Parvati Lakshmi is an Indian-American author, model, activist, producer and television host. Born in India, Lakshmi immigrated to the United States as a child and was raised in California. She became a model before embarking on a career in television. Lakshmi hosted the cooking competition program Top Chef on Bravo continuously from 2006 to 2023. She is also the creator, host, and executive producer of the docuseries Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, which premiered in June 2020 on Hulu. The series covers the food and culture of immigrant and indigenous communities across America. For her work with these two series, as an executive producer and as a host, she has received 16 Primetime Emmy nominations.
June Millicent Jordan was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Faith Ringgold was an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Ann Matthews Martin is an American children's fiction writer, known best for The Baby-Sitters Club series.
Ann Brashares is an American young adult novelist. She is best known as the author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.
Dorothy West was an American novelist short-story writer, and magazine editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement in the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated black art, literature, and music. She was one of the few Black women writers to be published in major literary magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. She is best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family and their attempts to climb the social ladder. She also explored the complexities of the black experience in the United States in short stories and essays that challenged stereotypes and explored themes such as race, class, and gender. Her work paved the way for future generations of African-American writers, and her legacy continues to inspire and influence writers today.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
Nabaneeta Dev Sen was an Indian writer and academic. After studying arts and comparative literature, she moved to the US where she studied further. She returned to India and taught at several universities and institutes as well as serving in various positions in literary institutes. She published more than 80 books in Bengali: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, travelogues, humour writing, translations and children's literature. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2000 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999.
Walter Dean Myers was an American writer of children's books best known for young adult literature. He was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, but was raised in Harlem, New York City. A tough childhood led him to writing and his school teachers would encourage him in this habit as a way to express himself. He wrote more than one hundred books including picture books and nonfiction. He won the Coretta Scott King Award for African-American authors five times. His 1988 novel Fallen Angels is one of the books most frequently challenged in the U.S. because of its adult language and its realistic depiction of the Vietnam War.
Padma Tiruponithura Venkatraman, also known as T. V. Padma, is an Indian-American author and scientist.
Allyson Braithwaite Condie is an author of young adult and middle grade fiction. Her novel Matched was a #1 New York Times and international bestseller, and spent over a year on the New York Times Bestseller List. The sequels are also New York Times bestsellers. Matched was chosen as one of YALSA's 2011 Teens' Top Ten and named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books of 2010. All three books are available in 30+ languages.
Marissa Meyer is an American novelist. A large portion of her bibliography is centered on retellings of fairy tales. She is best known for her series The Lunar Chronicles, which includes her 2012 debut novel, Cinder.
Nikki Glaser is an American stand-up comedian, actress, podcaster, radio host, and television host. She hosted the television series Not Safe with Nikki Glaser, which premiered on Comedy Central and Much on February 9, 2016. She is the star of the 2022 reality show Welcome Home Nikki Glaser? on E!. She hosted the Reality TV dating shows Blind Date (2019) on Bravo and FBoy Island (2021–) on HBO Max & The CW and its spinoff Lovers and Liars on The CW. She was announced as the host of the 2025 Golden Globes on August 28, 2024.
Dorothy Pitman Hughes was an American feminist, child-welfare advocate, activist, public speaker, author, and small business owner. Pitman Hughes co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance. Her activism and friendship with Gloria Steinem established racial balance in the nascent feminist movement.
Beth Revis is an American author of fantasy and science fiction, mainly for the young adult audience. She is best known for the Across the Universe trilogy, which consists of the novels Across the Universe, A Million Suns and Shades of Earth. Revis resides in North Carolina.
Raquel Jaramillo Palacio is an American author and graphic designer. She is the author of several novels for children, including the best-selling Wonder, which was adapted into a 2017 film starring Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson.
Renée Watson is an American teaching artist and author of children's books, best known for her award-winning and New York Times bestselling young adult novel Piecing Me Together, for which she received the John Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Bank Street Children's Book Committee's Josette Frank Award for fiction. Watson founded the nonprofit I, Too, Arts Collective to provide creative arts programs to the Harlem community. She is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street is a children's novel by Karina Yan Glaser published in 2017. It was Glaser's debut novel and is the first novel in a series of seven about a large mixed-race family living in Harlem and their friends, neighbors and extended family. In this novel, the family must find a way to stay in their beloved brownstone apartment after their landlord declines to renew their lease.
The Vanderbeekers is a series of seven middle-grade children's novels written and illustrated by Asian American author Karina Yan Glaser. Set primarily in Harlem, the books follow the adventures of a large multiracial family and their friends and neighbors. Although published between 2017 and 2023, reviewers noted that that books evoke older series about large families in urban settings, including Elizabeth Enright's Melendy family books and Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family series, as well as Jeanne Birdsall's The Penderwicks and Gertrude Chandler Warner's original Boxcar Children series. By the time of the final book's release in 2023, the Vanderbeekers books had sold more than half a million copies and been translated into 13 languages.
