Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Michael Martone is an American author. Since 1977, he has written nearly 30 books and chapbooks. He was a professor at the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2020.
Drue Heinz, DBE was a British-born American actress, philanthropist, arts patron, and socialite. She was the publisher of the literary magazine The Paris Review, co-founded Ecco Press, founded literary retreats and endowed the Drue Heinz Literature Prize among others. She was married to H. J. Heinz II, president of Heinz.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels, as well as a short story were adapted into films.
The Drue Heinz Literature Prize is a major American literary award for short fiction in the English language.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Todd James Pierce is an American novelist and short story writer.
Katherine Vaz is a Portuguese-American writer. A Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University (2003–2009), a 2006–2007 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fall, 2012 Harman Fellow at Baruch College in New York, she is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Above the Salt, a People Magazine Book of the Week and a Top Book of November, a Top Three Pick by Good Morning, America, and a Most Anticipated Book for Fall, 2023 by Zibby’s Books and Goodreads.
Leslie Pietrzyk is an American author who has published three novels, Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day, and Silver Girl, as well as two books of short stories, This Angel on My Chest and Admit This To No One. An additional historical novel, Reversing the River, set in Chicago on the first day of 1900, was serialized on the literary app, Great Jones Street.
Alma García is an American novelist and short story writer. University of Arizona Press published her debut novel, All That Rises, on October 17, 2023.
Jonathan Penner is an American fiction writer.
Ellen Hunnicutt was an American author.
Lucy Honig was an American short story writer.
John Blair is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
Brett Ellen Block is an American novelist and short story writer.
Justin Torres is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. He won the First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical debut novel We the Animals (2011), which was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and an NAACP Image Award nominee. The novel has been adapted into a film of the same title and was awarded the Next Innovator Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Torres' second novel, Blackouts, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.
Kore Press is an American nonprofit literary press founded in 1993 and located in Tucson, Arizona. The press publishes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by women, transgender or gender non-conforming women. Kore Press's output includes books, audio CDs, and broadsides.
Yang Huang is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Living Treasures, was a finalist for the 2008 Bellwether Prize and the 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards. Her short story collection, My Old Faithful, won 2017 Juniper Prize for Fiction. her novel, My Good Son, was the winner of 2020 University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize.
Troy Onyango is a Kenyan writer, editor and lawyer. His work has appeared in journals and magazines including Prairie Schooner, Wasafiri, Caine Prize Anthology, Brittle Paper, and Transition Magazine issue 121, for which his short story "The Transfiguration" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short story "For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings" won the fiction prize for the inaugural Nyanza Literary Festival (NALIF) Prize.
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian writer, known for her novel The Mourning Bird, which focuses on Zambia's AIDS crisis, and Obligations to the Wounded, her thematically linked collection of short stories centring the lives of Zambian women and girls. The Mourning Bird was awarded the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award in 2018/2019. In 2024, she became the first African writer to win the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature.
