Mikal Gilmore is an American writer and music journalist.
Kevin Young is an American poet and teacher of poetry and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young has been a winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues. Young has served as Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, as well as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. In March 2017, Young became poetry editor of The New Yorker.
M. K. Asante is an American author, filmmaker, recording artist, and professor. He is the author of the 2013 best-selling memoir Buck.
Hearts on Parade is the third studio album by American rock band American Hi-Fi. It was released on April 12, 2005, through Maverick Records. The album peaked at #129 on the US Billboard 200. Hearts on Parade received a nomination for "Album of the Year" at the Boston Music Awards in 2005.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic, who taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008. He is the author of A Jane Austen Education (2011), Excellent Sheep (2014), and The Death of the Artist (2020). His All Points blog appeared on the American Scholar website from March 2011 to September 2013.
Carmen Giménez Smith is an American poet, writer and editor.
Bill Marx is a theater critic based in Boston, Massachusetts. Marx served as theater and arts critic for WBUR from 1982 to 2006 and as the host of a podcast dedicated to books in translation for WGBH (FM) and Public Radio International's The World from 2007 to 2011.
Maureen McLane is an American poet, critic, and professor. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Margaret R. Manning was an American journalist and book reviewer. She was book editor of the Boston Globe the final ten years of her life, and twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Mira Jacob is an American writer. She is the author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing (2014), a novel about a patriarch who starts talking to ghosts, and Good Talk (2019), a graphic memoir.
Danez Smith is an African-American, poet, writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are queer, non-binary and HIV-positive. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards.
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a 2014 graphic memoir of American cartoonist and author Roz Chast. The book is about Chast's parents in their final years. Her father, George, died at the age of 95 and her mother, Elizabeth, who worked as an assistant elementary school principal, died at the age of 97. The author derived the book's title from her parents' refusal to discuss their advancing years and infirmities. Chast's cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker magazine since 1978. The book was appreciated for showcasing Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller. It received several awards and was a number 1 New York Times Bestseller.
The Emperor of Ocean Park is a 2002 novel by American author and law professor Stephen L. Carter. It is the first part of Carter's Elm Harbor series; two more novels in the series were published in 2007 and 2008. The book was Carter's first work of fiction, and spent 11 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list following its publication. Described as a murder mystery, the novel tells the story of Talcott Garland, a law professor who uncovers a mystery surrounding his father, the titular 'Emperor of Ocean Park'. Written from Tal's first person perspective, the book explores themes of privileged black identity, politics, and law, and contains many allusions to chess.
Meline Toumani is an American author and journalist. Her memoir There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019, she joined the faculty at Bard College to teach in their Globalization and International Affairs program.
