Susan Charlotte Faludi is an American feminist, journalist, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance". She was also awarded the Kirkus Prize in 2016 for In the Darkroom, which was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, which usually is translated into English as On the Nature of Things—and somewhat less often as On the Nature of the Universe. Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certainty is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated. De rerum natura was a considerable influence on the Augustan poets, particularly Virgil and Horace. The work was almost lost during the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered in 1417 in a monastery in Germany by Poggio Bracciolini and it played an important role both in the development of atomism and the efforts of various figures of the Enlightenment era to construct a new Christian humanism.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
De rerum natura is a first-century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through poetic language and metaphors. Namely, Lucretius explores the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"), and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.
Marginalia are marks made in the margins of a book or other document. They may be scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, drolleries, or illuminations.
Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, usually referred to simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early Renaissance humanist. He is noted for rediscovering and recovering many classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries. His most celebrated finds are De rerum natura, the only surviving work by Lucretius, De architectura by Vitruvius, lost orations by Cicero such as Pro Sexto Roscio, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Statius' Silvae, Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae, and Silius Italicus's Punica, as well as works by several minor authors such as Frontinus' De aquaeductu, Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper, and Eutyches.
Clinamen is the Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in order to defend the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus. In modern English it has come more generally to mean an inclination or a bias.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Michael Dirda is an American book critic, working for the Washington Post. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993.
Jess Walter is an American author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, and a non-fiction book. He is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006.
Debby Applegate is an American historian and biographer. She is the author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age and The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher is a 2006 biography of the 19th-century American minister Henry Ward Beecher, written by Debby Applegate and published by Doubleday. The book describes Beecher's childhood, ministry, support for the abolition of slavery and other social causes, and widely publicized 1875 trial for adultery.
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York is a New York Times best-selling non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum that was released by Penguin Press in 2010.
Greg Grandin is an American historian and author. He is a professor of history at Yale University. He previously taught at New York University.
Maureen Corrigan is an American author, scholar, and literary critic. She is the book critic on the NPR radio program Fresh Air and writes for the "Book World" section of The Washington Post. In 2014, she wrote So We Read On, a book on the origins and power of The Great Gatsby. In 2005, she published a literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. Corrigan was awarded the 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle for her reviews on Fresh Air on NPR and in The Washington Post, and the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism by the Mystery Writers of America for her book Mystery & Suspense Writers, co-authored with Robin W. Cook.
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and nonfiction book author.
The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on April 16, 2012, by the Pulitzer Prize Board for work during the 2011 calendar year. The deadline for submitting entries was January 25, 2012. For the first time, all entries for journalism were required to be submitted electronically. In addition, the criteria for the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting has been revised to focus on real-time reporting of breaking news. For the eleventh time in Pulitzer's history, no book received the Fiction Prize.
Ada Palmer is an American historian and writer and winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her first novel, Too Like the Lightning, was published in May 2016. The work has been well received by critics and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
In the Darkroom is a memoir by Susan Faludi that was first published on June 14, 2016. The memoir centers on the life of Faludi's father, who came out as transgender and underwent sex reassignment surgery at the age of 76. It won the 2016 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is based on the historic Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and was revealed as highly abusive. A university investigation found numerous unmarked graves for unrecorded deaths and a history into the late 20th century of emotional and physical abuse of students.
