James Alan McPherson was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work 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. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant.
Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Richard Read is a freelance reporter based in Seattle, where he was a national reporter and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2019 to 2021. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Oregonian, working for the Portland, Oregon newspaper from 1981 to 1986 and 1989 until 2016.
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), and The Dutch House (2019). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Jon Ellis Meacham is an American writer, reviewer, historian and presidential biographer who is serving as the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral since November 7, 2021. A former executive editor and executive vice president at Random House, he is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek. He is the author of several books. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. He holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Endowed Chair in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Daniel Alarcón is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Journalism School and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American author and journalist. He gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy.
Nathaniel Rich is an American novelist and essayist. Rich is the author of several books, was an editor for The Paris Review, and has contributed to several major magazines including The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Review of Books.
Christopher S. Stewart is an American author and investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, which he joined in 2011. In 2015, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative reporting with several colleagues for a series of articles exposing abuses in the Medicare system.
Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her article on the risk of a major earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest. In 2023, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography.
James Pogue is an American essayist and journalist. He is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine, and his pieces have appeared on the cover. He is the author of Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West, a first-person account of conflict over public lands in the American west.
Matthieu Aikins is a Canadian-American journalist and author best known for his reporting on the war in Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, as well as a Puffin Foundation Fellow at the Type Media Center. He has also been a fellow at New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin.
Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short-story writer.
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit, online journalism organization focusing on issues related to criminal justice in the United States. It was founded by former hedge fund manager Neil Barsky with former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller as its first editor-in-chief. Its website states that it aims to "create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system." Susan Chira has been editor-in-chief since 2019. It has won the Pulitzer Prize twice.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Undark Magazine is a non-profit online publication exploring science as a "frequently wondrous, sometimes contentious, and occasionally troubling byproduct of human culture." The name Undark is a deliberate reference to a radium-based luminous paint product, also called Undark, that ultimately proved toxic and, in some cases, deadly for the workers who handled it.
Ben Taub is an American journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has written for the magazine about a range of subjects related to jihadism, crime, conflict, and human rights, mostly in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
