W. Ralph Eubanks is author of When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land, which will be published January 13, 2026 by Beacon Press. He is also the author of th…
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and out…
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spe…
Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Anima…
Sherman Alexie is a Native American author, poet, and filmmaker known for his powerful portrayals of contemporary Indigenous life, often infused with wit, humor, and emotional depth. Drawing heavily o…
Eudora Alice Welty was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and she was awarded…
George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at…
James McBride is a native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools. He studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Masters in Journalism from Co…
Beatrice Sparks was an American therapist and Mormon youth counselor who was known for producing books purporting to be the 'real diaries' of troubled teenagers. The books deal with topical issues suc…
Richard Grant is a freelance British travel writer based in Arizona. He was born in Malaysia, lived in Kuwait as a boy and then moved to London. He went to school in Hammersmith and received a history…
Maria was born and raised in the Netherlands, and studied Visual Communications at George Washington University in DC. Maria's historical graphic novel Song of a Blackbird, about a female artist in th…
Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. Kara has written several books and reports on slavery and child labor, including the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Pri…
Jesmyn Ward is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Men We Reaped. She is a former Stegner Fellow (Stanford University) and Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Miss…
Ross Montgomery has worked as a pig farmer, a postman and a primary school teacher, so writing books was the next logical step. He spent his childhood reading everything he could get his hands on, fro…
Harrison Scott Key is the winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the author of three nonfiction novels: How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told (2023), Congratulations, W…
Nathan Thrall is an American author, essayist, and journalist, who is known for his 2023 nonfiction work A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, and is a contributor to sever…
Addie E. Citchens was born in the Mississippi Delta and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in Th…
Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other p…
Bridget Read is a features writer at New York magazine. Previously, she wrote for The Cut and was a culture writer at Vogue. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kate Price grew up in a small mill town in central Pennsylvania with her sister and parents in northern Appalachia. At the insistence of her mother, and through her academic accomplishments, Price esc…