Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
Gerald Daniel Stern was an American poet, essayist, and educator. The author of twenty collections of poetry and four books of essays, he taught literature and creative writing at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Raritan Valley Community College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. From 2009 until his death, he was a distinguished poet-in-residence and faculty member of Drew University's graduate program for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in poetry.
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American novelist and short story writer. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native Southern United States, in novels such as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), won him critical acclaim.
Charles Richard Johnson is an American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Larry Alfred Woiwode was an American writer from North Dakota, where he was the state's Poet Laureate from 1995 until his death. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He was the author of five novels; two collections of short stories; a commentary titled "Acts"; a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West; a book of poetry, Even Tide; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World. He received North Dakota's highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, in 1992.
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher.
Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
David Kirby is an American poet and the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University (FSU).
Christopher David Castellani is the author of four novels and artistic director of the creative writing non-profit GrubStreet.
Dr. Ravi Shankar is an American poet, editor, and former literature professor at Central Connecticut State University and City University of Hong Kong and Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He is the founding editor of online literary journal Drunken Boat. He has been called "a diaspora icon" by The Hindu and "one of America's finest younger poets" by former Connecticut poet laureate Dick Allen.
Joy Williams is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Best-known for her short fiction, she is also the author of novels including State of Grace, The Quick and the Dead, and Harrow. Williams has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, a Rea Award for the Short Story, a Kirkus Award for Fiction, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
Ron Smith is an American poet and the first writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.
Lee Kittredge Abbott was an American writer. He was the author of seven collections of short stories and was a professor emeritus of English at the Ohio State University in Columbus.
Wendy Brenner is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction and an Associate Professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington (1997-2023), where she won the university's Graduate Mentor Award for her work with MFA students. Brenner is the author of two books, the first of which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in such magazines as Allure, Seventeen, Travel & Leisure, The Oxford American, The Sun (magazine), Ploughshares, and Mississippi Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, and New Stories From the South, as well as other anthologies. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for her fiction, and is a Contributing Editor for The Oxford American. In 2016, she was named one of the "Queens of Nonfiction: 56 Women Journalists Everyone Should Read" on New York magazine's "The Cut" blog.
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.
Frank Giampietro is an American poet. He is interim director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, visiting assistant professor of poetry at Cleveland State University, and the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program (NEOMFA) program. He is author of Begin Anywhere. He was the 2010-2012 resident scholar at The Southern Review and has had poems, book reviews, and nonfiction published in many literary journals and magazines including 32 Poems, Cimarron ReviewColumbia Poetry Review, CutBank, Exquisite Corpse, Fence, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review and Rain Taxi. His honors include a 2008 Florida Book Award, a fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Kingsbury Fellowship from Florida State University. He is creator and editor of two literary websites, La Fovea and Poems by Heart. Giampietro earned an MA from Washington College, an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a PhD in English from Florida State University. He lives in Farmington, Maine with his wife, the potter, Cherie Giampietro and two children.
Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Les Standiford is an author and, since 1985, the Founding Director of the Florida International University Creative Writing Program in Miami, Florida. He also holds the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. His most recent books have been narrative non-fiction historical works. His novels featuring the character "John Deal" put him in the Miami School of crime fiction, whose progenitors are Charles Willeford and John D. MacDonald, and which includes Elmore Leonard, Jeff Lindsay, Carl Hiaasen, James W. Hall, Paul Levine, Edna Buchanan, and Barbara Parker.
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
