John Thomas Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor, and novelist. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish (1992) and Lone Star (1996). His film Men with Guns (1997) was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. His directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), has been added to the National Film Registry.
The Boys of Summer is a 1972 non-fiction baseball book by Roger Kahn. After recounting his childhood in Brooklyn and his life as a young reporter on the New York Herald Tribune, the author relates some history of the Brooklyn Dodgers up to their victory in the 1955 World Series. He then tracks the lives of the players over the subsequent years as they aged. The title of the book is taken from a Dylan Thomas poem that describes "the boys of summer in their ruin".
James Conrad Verraros is an American singer, songwriter, and actor, who placed ninth on the first season of American Idol. Raised by deaf parents, he is fluent in American Sign Language and gained notoriety on American Idol for signing the lyrics to his audition song. After competing on the series, he released three pop rock, dance albums with music producer and songwriter Gabe Lopez. Verraros was also featured on the 2002 compilation album American Idol: Greatest Moments, covering "Easy" by the Commodores – this album reached number four on the Billboard 200 chart.
Eight Men Out is a 1988 American sports drama film based on Eliot Asinof's 1963 book Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series. It was written and directed by John Sayles. The film is a dramatization of Major League Baseball's Black Sox Scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series. Much of the movie was filmed at the old Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Marguerite Henry was an American writer of children's books, writing fifty-nine books based on true stories of horses and other animals. She won the Newbery Medal for one of her books about horses and she was a runner-up for two others. One of the latter, Misty of Chincoteague (1947), was the basis for several sequels and for the 1961 movie Misty.
The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel by the American author Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003. It is a love story about Henry, a man, with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably, and about Clare, his wife, an artist, who has to cope with his frequent absences and dangerous experiences of reappearing in odd places. Niffenegger, who was frustrated in love when she began the novel, wrote the story as a metaphor for her failed relationships. The tale's central relationship came to Niffenegger suddenly and subsequently supplied the novel's title. The novel, which has been classified as both science fiction and romance, examines the themes of love, loss, and free will. In particular, the novel uses time travel to explore miscommunication and distance in relationships, while also investigating deeper existential questions.
Randall Kenan was an American author who was born in Brooklyn, New York. At only six weeks old, Kenan moved to Duplin County, North Carolina, a small rural community, where he lived with his grandparents in a small town named Wallace. The settings of many of Kenan's novels are centered around his home area of North Carolina. The focus of much of Kenan's work centers around what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. Some of Kenan's most notable works include the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992, A Visitation of Spirits, and The Fire This Time. Kenan was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize.
Michele Dominguez Greene is an American actress, singer/songwriter and author. She is known for her role as attorney Abigail "Abby" Perkins on the TV series L.A. Law from 1986 to 1991, for which she was nominated for a 1989 Primetime Emmy Award. She reprised the role in the 2002 TV reunion film L.A. Law: The Movie.
Stormbreaker is a young adult action-adventure book written by British author Anthony Horowitz, and is the first novel in the Alex Rider series. The book was released in the United Kingdom on the 4th of September 2000, and in United States release on 21 May 2001, where it became a New York Times Bestseller. Since its release, the book has sold more than nine million copies worldwide, been listed on the BBC's The Big Read, and in 2005 received a California Young Reader Medal.
The Memoirs of Cleopatra is a 1997 historical fiction novel written by American author Margaret George, detailing the purported life of Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt. Published on April 15, 1997, it landed on The New York Times Best Seller list for Fiction Hardcover. In 1999, the American network ABC adapted it for television, and released it as a four-part mini series entitled Cleopatra starring the French-Chilean actress Leonor Varela alongside Timothy Dalton and Billy Zane.
Solomon Time is a 2002 travel book by English writer Will Randall, subtitled Adventures in the South Pacific. The book was first published in the United Kingdom on 6 June 2002 through Abacus and was published in the United States the following year through Scribner.
The Baseball Card Adventures is a novel series written by Dan Gutman. There are 12 books in the series, published by HarperCollins between 1999 and 2015. The books feature a boy, Joe Stoshack, who can travel through time when he touches old baseball cards. When he holds a baseball card, he feels a tingling sensation, and when it gets strong, is transported to the year that card was made and somewhere near the ballplayer on the card. Later he discovers that this power also works on very old photographs. He tries to use this power wisely, and he attempts to change history several times, but the result is always something different from his original goal.
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher is a 2008 biography of the 19th-century American minister Henry Ward Beecher, written by Debby Applegate and published by Doubleday. The book describes Beecher's childhood, ministry, support for the abolition of slavery and other social causes, and widely publicized 1875 trial for adultery.
The Bluford Series is a widely read collection of contemporary American young adult novels set in the fictional inner-city high school of Bluford High in Southern California. Bluford is named for Guion "Guy" Bluford, the first African-American astronaut. The series was created and published by Townsend Press and was co-distributed by Scholastic. As part of an effort to promote reading in underfunded school districts, Townsend Press originally made the Bluford Series available to schools for a dollar each. As of 2018, over 11 million Bluford Series novels were in print.
Peter Mandel is an American journalist and children’s book author. Titles of his include Jackhammer Sam, Bun, Onion, Burger, and Say Hey! A Song of Willie Mays, one of the early picture books about African-American baseball stars from the 1960s, which was included in the Baseball As America exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Smithsonian.
Black Friday is an American thriller novel by James Patterson. The book was initially published in 1986 through Simon & Schuster and Patterson released a slightly re-written version of the novel in 2000 through Warner Books.
William B. Fawcett is an American editor, anthologist, game designer, book packager, fiction writer, and historian.
Leslie Dick is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, based in Los Angeles. Her work explores feminist themes, especially in relation to queer theory and Lacanian discourse. Dick has published two novels, a collection of short stories, and several critical essays. She is a member of the editorial board of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, a Los Angeles-based, internationally distributed journal of art. She has been faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) since 1992, and is currently co-director of the CalArts Program in Art. Since 2012 she has also held a position as a critic in the sculpture program at the Yale School of Art.
The Honorable Prison is a 1988 Young adult novel by Lyll Becerra de Jenkins. Based on de Jenkins' life, it is about Marta and her family who is placed under house arrest due to her newspaper editor father's criticism of a Latin American government. It won the 1989 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.
Cecelia Tichi is an American academic and author of mystery novels. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a former president of the American Studies Association, and the winner of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literature.
