Ames is a city in Story County, Iowa, United States, located approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of Des Moines in central Iowa. It is best known as the home of Iowa State University (ISU), with leading agriculture, design, engineering, and veterinary medicine colleges. A United States Department of Energy national laboratory, Ames Laboratory, is located on the ISU campus.
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.
Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than four million copies sold since its publication. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides' life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; unlike the protagonist, Eugenides is not intersex. The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.
Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980). Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several occasions in a form combining a journal and a memoir. It comprises the fictional autobiography of John Ames, an elderly, white Congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa, who knows that he is dying of a heart condition. At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956, and Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his seven-year-old son, who will have few memories of him. Ames indicates he was born in 1880 and that, at the time of writing, he is seventy-six years old.
Meridel Le Sueur was an American writer associated with the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born as Meridel Wharton, she assumed the name of her mother's second husband, Arthur Le Sueur, the former Socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
The Spirit Lake Massacre was an attack by a Wahpekute band of Santee Sioux on scattered Iowa frontier settlements during a severe winter. Suffering a shortage of food, the renegade chief Inkpaduta led 14 Sioux against the settlements near Okoboji and Spirit lakes in the northwestern territory of Iowa near the Minnesota border, in revenge of the murder of Inkpaduta's brother, Sidominadotah, and Sidominadotah's family by Henry Lott. The Sioux killed 35-40 settlers in their scattered holdings, took four young women captive, and headed north. The youngest captive, Abbie Gardner, was kept a few months before being ransomed in early summer. It was the last Native American attack on settlers in Iowa, but the events increased tensions between the Sioux and settlers in the Minnesota Territory. Nearly 30 years after the events, in 1885 Gardner-Sharp published her memoir, History of the Spirit Lake Massacre and Captivity of Miss Abbie Gardner, which was reprinted seven times in small editions. It was one of the last captivity narratives written of European Americans' being held by Native Americans. In 1891, Gardner-Sharp purchased the primitive family cabin and returned home. For the last 30 years of her life, she subsisted on the modest earnings from her book and souvenir sales. The town erected a historical monument to commemorate the attack. The State of Iowa now maintains the park and Abbie Gardner Sharp home site.
The Magic Window was an American children's television program broadcast on ABC affiliate WOI-TV in Ames, Iowa from 1951 to 1994. With a run of 43 years, it was the longest running children's television program in American history. Producer Dick Hartzell and WOI TV artist Joy (Ringham) Munn developed the show as an educational children's program, which featured handicraft activities, news items, and birthday recognition for the children viewing the show. Joy co-hosted the show with Craighton Knau for the first season (1951-1952), which was 30 minutes long and aired 3 times per week. During the second season, she became the sole host of the program. For that season the show was 15 minutes long and aired 5 days per week. Joy left the show in 1953. For all but the first three years of the show, it was hosted by Betty Lou Varnum, another pioneer in central-Iowa broadcasting.
The Year 24 Group is a grouping of female manga artists who heavily influenced shōjo manga beginning in the 1970s. While shōjo manga of the 1950s and 1960s largely consisted of simple stories marketed towards elementary school-aged girls, works by members of the group significantly developed shōjo manga by expanding it to incorporate new genres, themes, and subject material. Narratives and art styles in shōjo manga became more complex, and works came to examine topics such as psychology, gender, politics, and sexuality. Manga produced by the Year 24 Group brought the shōjo category into what scholars have described as its "golden age".
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. Her novel Another Brooklyn was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. She won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
Jeffrey Lloyd Zaslow was an American author and journalist, and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" was a lecture given by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Randy Pausch on September 18, 2007, that received widespread media coverage, and was the basis for The Last Lecture, a New York Times best-selling book co-authored with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow. Pausch had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006. On September 19, 2006, Pausch underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy to remove the malignant tumor from his pancreas. In August 2007, doctors discovered that the cancer had recurred. Pausch was given a terminal diagnosis and told to expect that three to six months of good health remained.
Jeffrey Angles (ジェフリー・アングルス) is a poet who writes free verse in his second language, Japanese. He is also an American scholar of modern Japanese literature and an award-winning literary translator of modern Japanese poetry and fiction into English. He is a professor of Japanese language and Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. Among his awards are the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2009 for his translation of Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako by Tada Chimako and the 2017 Yomiuri Prize for Literature in the poetry category for his own Japanese-language poetry collection Watashi no hizukehenkosen.
The Marriage Plot is a 2011 novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The novel grew out of a manuscript that Eugenides began after the publication of his sophomore Pulitizer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Eugenides has stated that he worked on the novel for about five or six years, and that portions are loosely based on his collegiate and post-collegiate experiences. The book is both a realist story about marriage and a commentary on the kind of story it tells.
Peter Ames Carlin is an American journalist, critic and biographer who has written for publications such as People magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Oregonian. Several of his published books focus on popular music and musicians, including Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson (2006).
Kirstin Cronn-Mills is an American author of children's books including the Minnesota Book Award finalist The Sky Always Hears Me And the Hills Don't Mind (2009) and Beautiful Music for Ugly Children (2012) which was a Stonewall Book Award winner and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her third novel, Original Fake (2016), was a Minnesota Book Award finalist in 2017, along with her third nonfiction volume for high school libraries, LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field. Her fourth novel, Wreck, will be published in 2019.
The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) was a women's organization founded by Jessie Daniel Ames in Atlanta, Georgia in November 1930, to lobby and campaign against the lynching of African Americans. The group was made up of middle and upper-class white women. While active, the group had "a presence in every county in the South" of the United States. It was loosely organized and only accepted white women as members because they "believed that only white women could influence other white women." Many of the women involved were also members of missionary societies. Along with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), the ASWPL had an important effect on popular opinion among whites relating to lynching.
Sudeep Nagarakar is an Indian novelist and writer of fiction. His first novel, Few Things Left Unsaid, was published by Srishti Publishers in 2011. Till 2020, twelve novels authored by him have been published. He is the recipient of the 2013 Youth Achievers' Award for writing for being one of the highest selling writers in India in romance genre. His book It started with a friend request was the most popular fiction book of 2013, according to Amazon India.
Tonya K. Bolden is an American writer best known for her works of children's literature, especially children's nonfiction. Bolden has authored, co-authored, collaborated on, or edited more than forty books. Hillary Rodham Clinton praised her 1998 book 33 Things Every Girl Should Know in a speech at Seneca Falls, N.Y. on the 150th anniversary of the first Women's Rights Convention. Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl (2005), her children's biography of Maritcha Rémond Lyons, was the James Madison Book Award Winner and one of four honor books for the American Library Association’s Coretta Scott King Author Award. M.L.K.: Journey of a King (2007) won the Orbis Pictus award from the National Council of Teachers of English, the organization’s highest award for children’s nonfiction, and the next year, her George Washington Carver (2008) was one of five honor books for the same award. In 2016, the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, D.C. selected Bolden for its Nonfiction Award in recognition of her entire body of work, which, according to the award, has “contributed significantly to the quality of nonfiction for children.”.
Fannie R. Buchanan (1875–1957) was an American musician and writer who organized music programs for people in rural Iowa. She was known for conducting music projects and writing songs for 4-H clubs. Buchanan was posthumously inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1984.
