Dan Simmons is an American science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles, among other works which span the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, sometimes within a single novel. Simmons's genre-intermingling Song of Kali (1985) won the World Fantasy Award. He also writes mysteries and thrillers, some of which feature the continuing character Joe Kurtz.
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Called the "King of Horror", his books have sold more than 350 million copies as of 2006, and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. His debut, Carrie, was published in 1974, and was followed by 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand and The Dead Zone. Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas, was his first major departure from the horror genre. The novellas provided the basis for the films Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil. Among the films adapted from King's novels are Carrie, Christine, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Misery, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile and It. He has published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman and has co-written works with other authors, notably his friend Peter Straub and sons Joe Hill and Owen King. He has also written nonfiction, notably On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Ridley Pearson is an American author of suspense, thriller and adventure books. Several of his books have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
Paul Zindel Jr. was an American playwright, young adult novelist, and educator.
Ethan Andrew Canin is an American author, educator, and physician. He is a member of the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Peter Craig is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for co-writing the screenplays to The Town (2010), The Batman, and Top Gun: Maverick, earning an Academy Award nomination for the lattermost.
Alan Kent Haruf was an American novelist.
Louise Welsh is an English-born author of short stories and psychological thrillers, resident in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also written three plays, an opera, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to journals and anthologies. In 2004, she received the Corine Literature Prize.
Richard Russell Riordan Jr. is an American author, best known for writing the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. Riordan's books have been translated into forty-two languages and sold more than thirty million copies in the United States. 20th Century Fox adapted the first two books of his Percy Jackson series as part of a series of films in which Riordan was not involved. Riordan currently serves as a co-creator and executive producer on the television series adaption of the book series that was released on Disney+ in 2023. Riordan's books have also spawned other related media, such as graphic novels and short story collections.
Laura Kasischke is an American fiction writer and poet. She is best known for writing the novels Suspicious River, The Life Before Her Eyes and White Bird in a Blizzard, all of which have been adapted to film.
The Dana Award is a literary award presented in short fiction, poetry and novels. It was founded in 1996 by literature professor and poet Mary Elizabeth Parker with the financial backing of Michael Dana. The competition is based in Greensboro, North Carolina. The judges for the competition include Scottish novelist Margot Livesey.
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
Frank Magid was an American marketing consultant, widely known for introducing the "Action News" format of evening local TV news, and was an original developer of Good Morning America. Time magazine named Magid "the nation's leading television news doctor" in 1977, and he became the namesake of the term "Magidized".
Paul Harding is an American musician and author, best known for his debut novel Tinkers (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2010 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize among other honors. He is currently the director of the Creative Writing and Literature MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, as well as Interim Associate Provost of SUNY-Stony Brook's Lichtenstein Center.
Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim. She has won several awards for her work, including the Locus Award. The three books of her Broken Earth series made her the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. She won a fourth Hugo Award, for Best Novelette, in 2020 for Emergency Skin. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020.
Jane Huffman is an American poet. She has a BA in theatre arts and English from Kalamazoo College and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has taught at the University of Iowa at the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing and worked at Prairie Lights Bookstore. She is Editor-in-Chief of Guesthouse and the Grants and Funding Manager for the Iowa Youth Writing Project. Formerly, she was Staff Director for Sundress Publications and Assistant Editor of 2014 Best of the Net Anthology.
