Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Joyce Dyer is a U.S. writer of nonfiction. Her memoir Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood tells the story of the author's attempt to remember the first five years of her life growing up in an ethnic neighborhood in Akron called Old Wolf Ledge, famous for its glacial formations, breweries, and cereal mills. Goosetown is the prequel to Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, her book about the decades when Akron was the Rubber Capital of the World. In it Dyer provides a loving but complicated portrait of her father and a view of the relationship between the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, its employees, and the city of Akron, Ohio. An earlier memoir, In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 1996, shortly after the death of Annabelle Coyne, the author's mother. Dyer has also edited two collections of essays, Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers and From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines. Her first book, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, was a scholarly study of Kate Chopin, a turn-of-the-century American writer. Joyce Dyer is Professor Emerita of English at Hiram College, where she directed the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature and held the John S. Kenyon Chair in English for several years. Recipient of the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award, the 2009 David B. Saunders Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2016 Independent Book Publisher Gold Medal Award for anthology, and Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, Dyer spent the last ten years working on a book about abolitionist John Brown, who grew up in Hudson, Ohio, where the author lives. A mix of memoir, biography, history, and travel writing, Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist was published by the University of Akron Press in May of 2022. In this book for general readers, Dyer reveals surprising details about John Brown’s life and grapples with troubling questions he raises. The book has been called "a thoughtful, elegantly written contribution to American studies" by Kirkus Reviews, awarded honorable mention by Civil War Monitor in their list of Best Civil War Books of 2022, and just selected as a finalist for both the 2023 Ohioana Book Award in the category of book about Ohio or an Ohioan and the Foreword Indies Best Book of the Year Award in biography for 2022. Indiana Magazine of History said Dyer worked "in a wholly creative, compulsively readable, fiercely original, and deeply contemplative way," and the Journal of Southern History said, "Dyer provides a narrative of intellectual and ethical reflections and growth.. . Further, in a climate that prioritizes the alleviation of supposed white discomfort over the instruction of history, this work will have particular personal value to educators." Dyer's biography is included in Contemporary Authors, volume 146, and in the New Revision Series, volume 91.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
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. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir from Coffee House Press and The Song Poet from Metropolitan Press. Her work has appeared in the Paj Ntaub Voice Hmong literary journal, "Waterstone~Review," and other publications. She is a contributing writer to On Being's Public Theology Reimagined blog. Additionally, Yang wrote the lyric documentary, The Place Where We Were Born. Yang currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Kristen Iversen is an American writer of nonfiction and fiction. Her books include Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, as well as the anthologies Don't Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn't Seen and Doom with a View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. She is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and Literary Nonfiction Editor of The Cincinnati Review. Iversen was chosen to be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen, Norway in 2020-2021.
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.
Carmen Giménez is an American poet, writer, and editor.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (2010), and the essay collections, Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Brenda Wineapple is an American nonfiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.
Shane McCrae is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Amy Butcher is an American writer and essayist. Her memoir, Mothertrucker, was published from Amazon Publishing literary press Little A Books in 2022. Her first book, Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder, was published in 2015. In August 2019, Makeready Films announced a film adaptation of Mothertrucker will be produced and directed by Jill Soloway and will star Julianne Moore. In February 2020, the Ohio State Arts Council awarded excerpts of Mothertrucker an Individual Excellence Award.
Sarah Monique Broom is an American writer. Her first book, The Yellow House (2019), received the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Meline Toumani is an American author and journalist. Her memoir There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019, she joined the faculty at Bard College to teach in their Globalization and International Affairs program.
Jerald Walker is an American writer and professor of creative writing and African American literature at Emerson College.
