Edward Sheriff Curtis was an American photographer and ethnologist whose work focused on the American West and on Native American people. Sometimes referred to as the "Shadow Catcher", Curtis traveled the United States to document and record the dwindling ways of life of various native tribes through photographs and audio recordings.
Geoffrey Champion Ward is an American editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, including 10 companion books to the documentaries he has written. He is the winner of seven Emmy Awards.
Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin's book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Goodwin produced the American television miniseries Washington. She was also executive producer of "Abraham Lincoln,” a 2022 docudrama on the History Channel. This latter series was based on Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times.
The Great Fire of 1910 was a wildfire in the Inland Northwest region of the United States that in the summer of 1910 burned three million acres in North Idaho and Western Montana, with extensions into Eastern Washington and Southeast British Columbia. The area burned included large parts of the Bitterroot, Cabinet, Clearwater, Coeur d'Alene, Flathead, Kaniksu, Kootenai, Lewis and Clark, Lolo, and St. Joe national forests. The fire burned over two days on the weekend of August 20–21, after strong winds caused numerous smaller fires to combine into a firestorm of unprecedented size. It killed 87 people, mostly firefighters, destroyed numerous manmade structures, including several entire towns, and burned more than three million acres of forest with an estimated billion dollars' worth of timber lost. While the exact cause of the fire is often debated, according to various U.S. Forest Service sources, the primary cause of the Big Burn was a combination of severe drought and a series of lightning storms that ignited hundreds of small fires across the Northern Rockies. However, the ignition sources also include human activity such as railroads, homesteaders, and loggers. It is believed to be the largest, although not the deadliest, forest fire in U.S. history.
Robert Kinloch Massie III was an American journalist and historian. He devoted much of his career to studying and writing about the House of Romanov, Russia's imperial family from 1613 to 1917. Massie was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World. He also received awards for his book Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011).
David Quammen is an American writer focusing on science, nature, and travel. He is the author of fifteen books. Quammen's articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals.
James MacGregor Burns was an American historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1971 Burns received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in History and Biography for his work on America's 32nd president, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom.
The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, also known as the Pacific Northwest Book Award (PNBA), is an annual award presented by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association to recognize "excellence in writing" from the American Pacific Northwest. First awarded in 1964, the awards require that the author and/or illustrator reside within the five-state PNBA region and that the book be published within the current calendar year. Past recipients include Chuck Palahniuk, Dana Simpson, Kim Barnes, Erik Larson, E.J. Koh, Karl Marlantes, Timothy Egan, Kathleen Flenniken, Donna Barba Higuera, Jonathan Raban and Lidia Yuknavitch.
Kim Barnes is a contemporary American author of fiction, memoir, and personal essays. She served as Poet Laureate of Idaho.
Jim Lynch is an American author of four novels. His work has been compared to authors including John Steinbeck, Ken Kesey, Tom Robbins, and Richard Russo.
Michael Wolf Duffy is a journalist and author. He is opinions editor at large for the Washington Post.
The University of Washington Press is an American academic publishing house. The organization is a division of the University of Washington, based in Seattle. Although the division functions autonomously, it has worked to assist the university's efforts in support of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education. Since 1915, it has published the works of first-time writers, including students, poets, and artists, along with authors known throughout the world for their work in the humanities, arts, and sciences.
The Chautauqua Prize is an annual American literary award established by the Chautauqua Institution in 2012. The winner receives US$7,500 and all travel and expenses for a one-week summer residency at Chautauqua. It is a "national prize that celebrates a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts."
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction were established in 2012 to recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year. They are named in honor of nineteenth-century American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in recognition of his deep belief in the power of books and learning to change the world.
Madeline Miller is an American novelist, author of The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018). Miller spent ten years writing The Song of Achilles while she worked as a teacher of Latin and Greek. The novel tells the story of the love between the mythological figures Achilles and Patroclus; it won the Orange Prize for Fiction, making Miller the fourth debut novelist to win the prize. She is a 2019 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America is a 2012 non-fiction book by the American author Gilbert King. It is a history of the attorney Thurgood Marshall's defense of four young black men in Lake County, Florida, who were accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. They were known as the Groveland Boys. Marshall led a team from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Published by Harper, the book was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The Pulitzer Committee described it as "a richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice."
Paul Hendrickson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He is a senior lecturer and member of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post.
Daniel James Brown is an American author of narrative nonfiction books.
William Buckhout Greeley was the third chief of the United States Forest Service, a position he held from 1920 to 1928. During World War I he commanded U.S. Army forest engineers in France, providing Allied forces with the timber necessary for the war effort.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism is a 909-page historical nonfiction book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin that was published by Simon & Schuster in November 2013. The book centers on the relationship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and the activities of investigative journalists who impacted on public opinion during the Progressive Era. Upon its release, the book received positive reviews, with reviewers praising the research and readability, and won several accolades.
