Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
Ironweed is a 1983 novel by American author William Kennedy. Ironweed received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is the third book in Kennedy's Albany Cycle. It is included in the Western Canon of the critic Harold Bloom. The novel was adapted into a 1987 film of the same name.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel Ironweed.
Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar, is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Sherrilyn Kenyon is a bestselling US writer. Under her former married name, she wrote both urban fantasy and paranormal romance. She is best known for her Dark Hunter series. Under the pseudonym Kinley MacGregor she writes historical fiction with paranormal elements. Kenyon's novels have sold over 70 million copies in print in over 100 countries. Under both names, her books have appeared at the top of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today lists, and they are frequent bestsellers in Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Andrea Barrett is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel and Natural History were finalists for The Story Prize.
Rilla Askew is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in Poteau, in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, and grew up in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Jayne Anne Phillips is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is an American writer, of Chinese descent. She previously taught writing and literature in the graduate MFA writing program at Otis College of Art and Design until 2015. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.
Weston Ochse was an American author and educator. He won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for his short fiction. His novel SEAL Team 666 is currently being shopped by Seven Bucks Productions. Dwayne Johnson has attached himself to the film to executive produce as well as act in a leading role.
Linda "Jamilah" Kolocotronis was an American Muslim writer and former educator in American Islamic schools. Of Greek origin, she converted to Islam at the age of 23, and she published several Islamic fiction novels as well as her doctoral dissertation. Kolocotronis changed her first name to Jamilah when she became Muslim in 1980.
The Christmas Tree is Irish author Jennifer Johnston's sixth novel, first published in 1981 by Hamish Hamilton. It has been suggested by The Irish Times as being her finest work, and was chosen by the Irish Independent to be published as one of the books its "Irish Women Writers" collection. It is one of U.S. writer Lionel Shriver's favourite books and was adapted for television in 1986.
Alice Mattison is an American novelist and short story writer.
Pamela Erens is an American writer who appeared on a list compiled by the Reader's Digest of "23 Contemporary Writers You Should Have Read by Now". She has written three critically acclaimed novels for adults, a highly praised novel for middle schoolers, and the memoir/critical hybrid Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life. Her debut novel, The Understory (2007), was a fiction finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,. Erens's second novel, The Virgins (2013), received accolades from many sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. It was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her third novel, Eleven Hours, was published in May 2016. It was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New Yorker, NPR, and Kirkus. Erens's middle grade novel, Matasha, was published in June 2021. Erens has also written essays and critical articles for publications such as The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Virgins is the second novel by American author Pamela Erens, published in 2013 by Tin House Books. It received accolades from many sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Publishers Weekly named it one of the best boarding school books of all time.
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
Alison Stine is an American poet and author whose first novel Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. Her poetry and nonfiction has been published in a number of newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paris Review, and Tin House.
