Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by American author Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997. It presents a fictionalized account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work.
Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin's book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Goodwin produced the American television miniseries Washington. She was also executive producer of "Abraham Lincoln", a 2022 docudrama on the History Channel. This latter series was based on Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Tananarive Priscilla Due is an American author and educator. Due won the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood. She is also known as a film historian with expertise in Black horror. Due teaches a course at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic", which focuses on the Jordan Peele film Get Out.
Susan Straight is an American writer. She was a National Book Award finalist for the novel Highwire Moon in 2001.
Peter Balakian is an Armenian-American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
The St. Vrain massacre was an incident in the Black Hawk War. It occurred near present-day Pearl City, Illinois, in Kellogg's Grove, on May 24, 1832. The massacre was most likely committed by Ho-Chunk warriors who were unaffiliated with Black Hawk's band of warriors. It is also unlikely that the group of Ho-Chunk had the sanction of their nation. Killed in the massacre were United States Indian Agent Felix St. Vrain and three of his companions. Some accounts reported that St. Vrain's body was mutilated.
Alan Stuart Cheuse was an American writer, editor, professor of literature, and radio commentator. A longtime NPR book commentator, he was also the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and novellas, a memoir and a collection of travel essays. In addition, Cheuse was a regular contributor to All Things Considered. His short fiction appeared in respected publications like The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, among other places. He taught in the Writing Program at George Mason University and the Community of Writers.
Felix St. Vrain, born Felix August Antoine St. Vrain, was an American United States Indian agent who was killed by Native Americans during the Black Hawk War. St. Vrain died along with three companions while on a mission to deliver dispatches from Dixon's Ferry to Fort Armstrong, both in Illinois. The incident has become known as the St. Vrain massacre.
Carolyn See was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for the Washington Post for 27 years.
The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction is awarded by PEN America biennially "to a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective and illuminating important contemporary issues which have been published in the United States during the previous two calendar years. It is intended that the winning book possess the qualities of intellectual rigor, perspicuity of expression, and stylistic elegance conspicuous in the writings of author and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose four dozen books and countless other publications continue to provide an important and incisive commentary on the American social, intellectual and political scene."
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown (2011) is a history of the Jonestown settlement and massacre in 1978. Written by journalist Julia Scheeres, the book chronicles the lives of five people who resided in Jonestown before the mass murder-suicides that claimed 918 lives.
Citizen: An American Lyric is a 2014 book-length poem and a series of lyric essays by American poet Claudia Rankine. Citizen stretches the conventions of traditional lyric poetry by interweaving several forms of text and media into a collective portrait of racial relations in the United States. The book ranked as a New York Times Bestseller in 2015 and won several awards, including the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry Best Collection.
Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé is a 2018 collection of essays by Michael Arceneaux. Published by Atria Books, the collection includes seventeen essays, discussing Arceneaux's conflicting identities, his internalized homophobia, his journey as a writer, and his experiences dating. It also discusses his passion for the singer Beyoncé, who shares his hometown of Houston, Texas.
Javon Johnson is an American spoken word poet, writer, and professor. He is the director of African American and African Diaspora Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities.
Interior Chinatown is a 2020 novel by Charles Yu. It is his second novel and was published by Pantheon Books on January 28, 2020. It won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The novel was also longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis étranger.
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own is a 2020 book by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Covering the life and works of American writer and activist James Baldwin, and the theme of racial inequality in the United States, Glaude uses these topics to discuss what he views as historical failed opportunities for America to "begin again". He analyzes Baldwin's activism and sexuality and his non-fiction writings, perceiving a shift in his later works. Glaude uses ideas from Baldwin to comment on contemporary racial topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013.
Adriana E. Ramírez is an American writer and critic of Mexican and Colombian descent. Her writing addresses the history and culture of violence in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States.
