James Arthur Baldwin was an African American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.
Fanny Howe is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
The Believer is an American bimonthly magazine of interviews, essays, and reviews, founded by the writers Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, and Ed Park in 2003. The magazine is a five-time finalist for the National Magazine Award.
Josip Novakovich is a Croatian Canadian writer.
Notes of a Native Son is a collection of ten essays by James Baldwin, published in 1955, mostly tackling issues of race in America and Europe.
Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.
Percival Leonard Everett II is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic" and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, curator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013–2015, before returning to the New School as a professor of writing.
Albert Goldbarth is an American poet. He has won the National Book Critics Circle award for "Saving Lives" (2001) and "Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology" (1991), the only poet to receive the honor two times. He also won the Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, in 2008. Goldbarth is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.
The Iowa Review is an American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews.
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Casualty Reports, Because What Else Could I Do, Night Unto Night, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front, as well as two chapbooks and four books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.
Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books.
Donna Stonecipher is an American poet.
D. J. Waldie is an American essayist, memoirist, translator, and editor who also is the former Deputy City Manager of Lakewood, California.
Jeffery Renard Allen is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits and Stellar Places, and four works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, the story collection Holding Pattern a second novel, Song of the Shank, and his most recent book, the short story collection “Fat Time and Other Stories”. He is also the co-author with Leon Ford of “An Unspeakble Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building A Better Future for My Son”.
John D'Agata is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay". He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame", and "About a Mountain".
On Immunity: An Inoculation is a nonfiction book by Eula Biss published by Graywolf Press in 2014. It is primarily about vaccination of children. Bill Gates endorsed it on Twitter, saying "On Immunity is a great book that is not out to demonize anyone who holds opposing views." Literary Review described the book as "vital and passionate, at times maddening, always fascinating."
