Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her 2001 play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks is the first African American woman to achieve this honor for drama.
Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and professorial fellow of New College. She is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright.
Michael Terrence Holland is an American college athletics administrator and former basketball player and coach. He is currently the Emeritus Director of Athletics and special assistant to Chancellor Steve Ballard at East Carolina University. Holland served as the head men's basketball coach at Davidson College from 1969 to 1974 and at the University of Virginia from 1974 to 1990, compiling a career college basketball coaching record of 418–216. While coaching at Virginia, he was responsible for signing the nation's top-ranked high school basketball player, seven-foot-four-inch Ralph Sampson, who went on to become a three-time consensus collegiate national player-of-the-year as a Cavalier. Following his retirement from coaching, Holland was the athletic director at Davidson from 1990 to 1994, at Virginia from 1994 to 2001, and at East Carolina from 2004 to 2013.
Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University's Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Mrs Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, a collection of new and selected stories, was published in 2010.
Karen Lynne Hall is an American television writer, producer, author, bookstore owner and a member of the George Foster Peabody Awards board of jurors, best known for her work on the television series Judging Amy and M*A*S*H.
Claudia Emerson was an American poet. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008.
Femi Euba is a Nigerian actor, writer and dramatist, who has published numerous works of drama, theory and fiction. As a theatre practitioner his work encompasses acting, playwriting and directing. Among the topics of his plays is Yoruba culture.
Ron Smith is an American poet and the first writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.
Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of the essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is an assistant professor of English.
Andrea Hairston is an African-American science fiction and fantasy playwright and novelist. Her novel Redwood and Wildfire won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for 2011. Mindscape, Hairston's first novel, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Hairston was one of the Guests of Honor at the science fiction convention Wiscon in May 2012.
Sheri Wilner is an American playwright.
Theresa Pollak was an American artist and art educator born in Richmond, Virginia. She was a nationally known painter, and she is largely credited with the founding of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a teacher at VCU's School of the Arts between 1928 and 1969. Her art has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 103 on September 18, 2002 and was given a memorial exhibition at Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University.
Joanna Ruth Randerson is a New Zealand writer, director and performer. She is the founder and artistic director of Barbarian Productions, a Wellington-based theatre production company.
Virginia Grise is an award-winning playwright, and director. Grise's most recognized work is blu, the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama Series Award and a finalist for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' Latino/a Playwrighting Award. In addition, Grise is the co-writer of The Panza Monologues with Irma Mayorga, and edited a volume of Zapatista communiqués called Conversations with Don Durito. She is also a recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and the Princess Grace Award in Theater Directing.
David Freed is an American artist based in Richmond, Virginia where he taught in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. His art has been shown extensively throughout the world and is in the collections of major museums and private collections. He is known for his masterful prints using the intaglio technique of etching and for his collaboration with major poets such as Charles Wright and Larry Levis in creating artist's books combining his etchings with their poetry.
La Vinia Delois Jennings is an American literary scholar and critic of twentieth-century American literature and culture, currently a Distinguished Humanities Professor at the University of Tennessee, and also formerly a Lindsay Young Professor and a 1998 Fulbright Senior Lecturer appointed to the University of Málaga in Spain.
Julia Jarcho is an American experimental playwright and director and professor of theater and performance studies. The NYC company Minor Theater produces and debuts her new works. She won the 2013 Obie for Best New American Play for Grimly Handsome. Chief theater critic for The New York Times Ben Brantley has called her “a queen of experimental mayhem.”
Richard Carlyon (1930–2006) was an American artist who lived in Richmond, Virginia and taught at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts, where he became a professor emeritus.
