Uli Beutter Cohen is a German-born American documentarian, living in New York City. She is the creator of Subway Book Review on Instagram.
Uli Beutter Cohen's work explores connection, identity, and belonging. Over the course of her documentation for Subway Book Review, she has interviewed everyday people and prominent figures. [1]
In 2013 Beutter Cohen moved to New York City and started documenting readers on the subway. [2] She shares her photography and interviews on social media. [3] What started as an experiment on the Q Train has been called "one of the few purely good things on the internet" [4] and has been widely praised by reviewers. [5] [6]
For Subway Book Review's 5-year anniversary in 2019, Beutter Cohen threw a surprise party on the G train and gave away over 400 books to commuters. Broad City's Abbi Jacobson joined the afterparty as a surprise guest. [7] [8]
Beutter Cohen is a social justice advocate. She served on the advisory board of the Black Gotham Experience [9] and is currently an active member of PEN America's Literary Action Coalition [10] speaking to how the publishing industry needs to change sustainably to support multidimensional, intersectional writers and readers. [11]
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. She is the author of nine novels and a collection of essays. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, Absolution was awarded the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month. In total, the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Roya Hakakian is an Iranian American Jewish journalist, lecturer, and writer. Born in Iran, she came to the United States as a refugee and is now a naturalized citizen. She is the author of several books, including an acclaimed memoir in English called Journey from the Land of No (Crown), Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), and A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf).
Jewell Parker Rhodes is an American bestselling novelist and educator.
Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is a visiting professor of literature at Bard College, and was formerly president of PEN American Center.
Anita Nair is an Indian novelist who writes her books in English. She is best known for her novels A Better Man, Mistress, and Lessons in Forgetting. She has also written poetry, essays, short stories, crime fiction, historical fiction, romance, and children's literature, including Muezza and Baby Jaan: Stories from the Quran.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Peter Cole is a MacArthur-winning poet and translator who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven. Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981. He has been called "one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation" by the critic Harold Bloom. In a 2015 interview in The Paris Review, he described his work as poet and translator as "at heart, the same activity carried out at different points along a spectrum."
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. She has experimented with different styles of writing, including writing obituaries for parts of her life, including her parents and herself, in Obit, letters in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and a Japanese form known as waka in The Trees Witness Everything. In all of her poems and books, Chang has several common themes: living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. She has also written two books for children.
Adina Hoffman is an American writer whose work blends literary and documentary elements. Her books concern, among other things, the "lives and afterlives of people, movies, buildings, books, and certain city streets."
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.
Book of Numbers, published in 2015, is a metafiction novel written by author Joshua Cohen. The novel is about a writer named Joshua Cohen who is contracted to ghostwrite the autobiography of a tech billionaire called Joshua Cohen. It was published by Random House, and released in 2015.
Kerry Howley is an American feature writer at New York magazine, a professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, and a screenwriter. She is the author of the work of literary nonfiction Thrown (2014).
Wayétu Moore is a Liberian-American author and social entrepreneur. Her debut novel, She Would Be King, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2018, and was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. The novel was positively reviewed by Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Moore has published work in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, The Atlantic, and other journals. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction in 2019. Moore's memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, was named a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazine 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, and a Publishers Weekly Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2020. In 2011, Moore founded a publishing house and nonprofit organization, One Moore Book, which publishes and distributes books intended for children in countries underrepresented in literature.
Milk and Honey is a collection of both abstract fiction and non-fiction poetry and prose by Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. The collection's themes feature aspects of survival, feminism and relationships, and is divided into four sections, with each section serving a different purpose and relevance to Kaur's personal experiences. The sections further explore the themes of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity, accompanied by simple line art illustrations. These sections are titled "the hurting", "the loving", "the breaking" and "the healing". Kaur has cited her cultural background as an inspiration for the book's style, as well as an attempt to make the book more accessible to a wide demographic or readers. The book's simplistic style and themes have drawn forth some negative criticism and alleged rumours about Kaur herself. Critics have sometimes referred to Kaur's work as "Instapoetry" due to Kaur's usage of social media platform Instagram to market her poems and illustrations.
George Matthew Johnson, more commonly known as George M. Johnson, is an American author, journalist, and activist. A queer African American, they are best known as the author of the memoir-manifesto All Boys Aren't Blue (2020).
Anaïs Duplan is a queer and trans Haitian writer now based in the U.S., with three book publications from Action Books, Black Ocean Press, and Brooklyn Arts Press, along with a chapbook from Monster House Press. His work has been honored by a Whiting Award and a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International. He is a Professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, of which he is also an alum.