Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. She is the author of nine novels and a collection of essays. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, Absolution was awarded the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer.
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.
Hope Raue Larson is an American illustrator and cartoonist. Her main field is comic books.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
Sloane Crosley is an American writer living in New York City known for her humorous essays, which are often collected into books like I Was Told There'd Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There.
Paul Bayard La Farge was an American novelist and essayist. He wrote five novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011), and The Night Ocean (2017), all of which, particularly Haussmann, earned positive critical attention. His essays, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Believer, The Village Voice, Harper's, and The New Yorker.
Vivian Gornick is an American radical feminist critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019, and which was a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics' Pick. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Edie Meidav is an American novelist.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. She has experimented with different styles of writing, including writing obituaries for parts of her life, including her parents and herself, in Obit, letters in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and a Japanese form known as waka in The Trees Witness Everything. In all of her poems and books, Chang has several common themes: living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. She has also written two books for children.
The Potashes were a 19th-century Irish-American street gang active in Greenwich Village and the New York waterfront during the early to mid-1890s. One of the many to rise in New York City during the "Gay Nineties" period, the gang was led by Red Shay Meehan and based near the Babbit Soap Factory on Washington Street near present-day Rector Street.
Red Light Lizzie was the pseudonym of an American madam, procuress and underworld figure in New York City during the mid-to late 19th century.
Marie K. Rutkoski in Hinsdale, Illinois is an American children's writer, and professor at Brooklyn College. She has three younger siblings. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in English with a minor in French in 1999, and then her English M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2003 and 2006 respectively. She lives in Brooklyn with her family and two cats, Cloud and Firefly.
Laura van den Berg is an American fiction writer. She is the author of five works of fiction. Her first two collections of short stories were each shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, in 2010 and 2014. In 2021, she was awarded the Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Catherine Lacey is an American writer.
Judith Thurman is an American writer, biographer, and critic. She is the recipient of the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction for her biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. Her book Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette was a finalist for the 1999 nonfiction National Book Award. In 2016, she received the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Marie-Helene Bertino is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of three novels, Beautyland (2024), Parakeet (2020) and 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), and one short story collection, Safe as Houses (2012). She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize for her short stories.
