Lehigh University (LU) is a private research university in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. The university was established in 1865 by businessman Asa Packer and was initially affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Lehigh University's undergraduate programs have been coeducational since the 1971–72 academic year. As of 2019, the university had 5,047 undergraduate students and 1,802 graduate students.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
Elon University is a private university in Elon, North Carolina. Founded in 1889 as Elon College, Elon is organized into six schools, most of which offer bachelor's degrees and several of which offer master's degrees or professional doctorate degrees.
Carolyn D. Wright was an American poet. She was a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.
Peter Watts is a Canadian science fiction author. He specializes in hard science fiction. He earned a Ph.D from the University of British Columbia in 1991 from the Department of Zoology and Resource Ecology. He went on to hold several academic research and teaching positions, and worked as a marine-mammal biologist. He began publishing fiction around the time he finished graduate school.
Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She won the 2013 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Marianne Wiggins is an American author. According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, Wiggins writes with "a bold intelligence and an ear for hidden comedy." She has won a Whiting Award, an National Endowment for the Arts award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2004 for her novel Evidence of Things Unseen.
Nell Freudenberger is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.
Mary Hood is a fiction writer of predominantly Southern literature, who has authored three short story collections – How Far She Went,And Venus is Blue and A Clear View of the Southern Sky – two novellas – And Venus is Blue and Seam Busters – and a novel, Familiar Heat. She also regularly publishes essays and reviews in literary and popular magazines.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Ben Fountain is an American writer currently living in Dallas, Texas. He has won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012).
Mark Powell is an American novelist. He is the author of six novels, most recently Small Treasons and Firebird. A highly decorated author, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, as well as two Fulbright Fellowships. Educated at The Citadel, The University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School, Powell teaches in the English Department at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He repeatedly serves as the fiction workshop leader for the Hindman Settlement School's Appalachian Writers Workshop and the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University. Powell's early work has established him in the southern Appalachian tradition alongside writers such as Pamela Duncan, Silas House and Ron Rash. His recent fiction is more global in scope, in the vein of Robert Stone and Bob Shacochis.
Wendy Barker was an American poet. She was Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she taught since 1982.
Sara Elizabeth Ganim is an American journalist and podcast host. She is the current Hearst Journalism Fellow at the University of Florida's Brechner Center for Freedom of Information and the James Madison Visiting Professor on First Amendment Issues at the Columbia Journalism School. Previously, she was a correspondent for CNN. In 2011 and 2012, she was a reporter for The Patriot-News, a daily newspaper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There she broke the story that featured the Sandusky scandal and the Second Mile charity. For the Sandusky/Penn State coverage, "Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff" won a number of national awards including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, making Ganim the third-youngest winner of a Pulitzer. The award cited "courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Sandusky sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky."
Eduardo C. Corral is an American poet and MFA Assistant Professor in the Department of English at NC State University. His first collection, Slow Lightning, published by Yale University Press, was the winner of the 2011 Yale Younger Series Poets award, making him the first Latino recipient of this prize. His 2020 work, guillotine, was awarded the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for gay poetry and was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.
Lucas Hnath is an American playwright. He won the 2016 Obie Award for excellence in playwriting for his plays Red Speedo and The Christians. He also won a Whiting Award.
The 49th NAACP Image Awards ceremony, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), honored outstanding representations and achievements of people of color in motion pictures, television, music, and literature during the 2017 calendar year. The ceremony took place on January 15, 2018 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, was hosted by Anthony Anderson and broadcast on TV One.
Carolina (Caro) De Robertis is a Uruguayan-American author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. They are the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope (2017), which include essays by such writers as Junot Diaz and Jane Smiley. They are also well known for their translational work, frequently translating Spanish pieces.
