Larry Jeff McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, prominent book collector, bookseller and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations.
Gregory Rabassa, ComM, was an American literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English. He taught for many years at Columbia University and Queens College.
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Susan Choi is an American novelist.
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.
Anthony Swofford is an American writer and former U.S. Marine, best known for his 2003 book Jarhead, based heavily on his accounts of various situations encountered in the Persian Gulf War. This memoir was the basis of the 2005 film of the same name, directed by Sam Mendes.
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.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Kathryn Harrison is an American author. She has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
Peter Balakian is an Armenian-American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
The Burlington Liars' Club is an American organization that awards the title "World Champion Liar" annually. The club, located in Burlington, Wisconsin, has been bestowing the award since 1929.
Marie Arana is an author, editor, journalist, critic, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Jacki Lyden is an American journalist and author of the memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (1999).
Eileen Welsome is an American journalist and author. She received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1994 while a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune for a 3-part story titled "The Plutonium Experiment" published beginning on November 15, 1993. She was awarded the prize for her articles about the government's human radiation experiments conducted on unwilling and unknowing Americans during the Cold War. Welsome also has received a George Polk Award, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Gold Medal, the Heywood Broun Award, as well as awards from the National Headliners Association and the Associated Press. In 1999, Welsome wrote the book The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. In 2000, Welsome received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and the PEN Center USA West Award in Research Nonfiction for The Plutonium Files.
Susan Brind Morrow is an American author and poet.
The Kiss is a memoir by American author Kathryn Harrison. First published in 1997, the memoir details her relationship with her estranged father, which culminated in a sexual affair when they finally met again when she was an adult.
Awards presented by the PEN American Center that are no longer active.
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.
