Patricia Powell (born 1966) is a Jamaican writer, who has won awards for her novels.
Born in Jamaica, she moved to the United States in her late teens. She received her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, where she studied with Michael Ondaatje, among others.
She began her teaching career in 1991 in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2001, Powell was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. [1] In 2003, she was announced as the Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at MIT. [2] Since 2009, she has been on the English faculty at Mills College. [3]
Most of her work is not autobiographical, but explores personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, [4] to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, [5] to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence. [6]
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. Her novels and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.
Patricia Frances Grace is a New Zealand Māori writer of novels, short stories, and children's books. She began writing as a young adult, while working as a teacher. Her early short stories were published in magazines, leading to her becoming the first female Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, Waiariki, in 1975. Her first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps, followed in 1978.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Elinor Lipman is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
Rilla Askew is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in Poteau, in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, and grew up in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Michelle Carla Cliff was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (2004).
Linda K. Hogan is a poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She is currently the Chickasaw Nation's Writer in Residence. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.
Glenda Emilie Adams was an Australian novelist and short story writer, probably best known as the winner of the 1987 Miles Franklin Award for Dancing on Coral. She was a teacher of creative writing, and helped develop writing programs.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo, is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other, jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker.
Cornelia Nixon is an American novelist, short-story writer, and teacher. She has lived much of her mature life in the San Francisco Bay area.
Sandra McDonald is an American science fiction and fantasy author.
Jennifer Archer is an author of young adult/teen fiction, women's fiction and romance born in Cleburne, north central Texas. Her novels typically have strong female protagonists, and have been nominated for numerous awards.
Laleh Khadivi is an Iranian American novelist, and filmmaker.
Jenn Ashworth is an English writer born in 1982 in Preston, Lancashire. In June 2018 Ashworth was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.
Leni Zumas is an American writer from Washington, D.C., who lives in Oregon. She is the author of Red Clocks,The Listeners and the story collection Farewell Navigator. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in BOMB, The Cut, Granta, Guernica, Portland Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times Style (UK), Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Portland State University.
Laraine Herring is an American writer of both novels and nonfiction books. Laraine's poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Midnight Mind and Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest. She was awarded the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant for her fiction, and her non-fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Paola Corso is an American fiction writer, poet, photographer and literary activist. Corso is a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award Winner,, and included on the Pennsylvania Center for the Book's Literary Map. She is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, including 'Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps,' (2020) with original photos by the author and archival photographs from the University of Pittsburgh Library; Catina's Haircut: A Novel in Stories (2010) on Library Journal’s notable list of first novels; Giovanna's 86 Circles And Other Stories (2005), a Binghamton University's John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist; a book of poems, Death by Renaissance (2004), and award-winning poetry collections, The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing; and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing (2012), about Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and winner of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award.
Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer, from Jamaica who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University (NYU). She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.