Joseph P. Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He teaches courses on world religions, religion in America, new religious movements, and the intersection of…
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts …
William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist, satirist, and journalist, best known for his keen social commentary and his novel Vanity Fair (1847–1848). His works often explored themes of ambit…
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and…
bell hooks (deliberately in lower-case; born Gloria Jean Watkins) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender…
Robert Albert Bloch was a prolific American writer. He was the son of Raphael "Ray" Bloch (1884, Chicago-1952, Chicago), a bank cashier, and his wife Stella Loeb (1880, Attica, Indiana-1944, Milwaukee…
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (Михаил Юрьевич Лермонтов), a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", was the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pu…
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist writer best known for shooting the artist Andy Warhol in 1968. She wrote the SCUM Manifesto, an essay on patriarchal culture advocating the creati…
Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th ce…
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is among most the influential educational thinkers of the late 20th century. Born in Recife, Brazil, on September 19, 1921, Freire died of heart failure in Sao Paul…
French critic Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole François Thibault wrote sophisticated, often satirical short stories and novels, including Penguin Island (1908), and won the Nobel Prize …
James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a frien…
Thomas de Quincey was an English author and intellectual, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_d...
Son of a small shopkeeper, he attended Manchester Grammar School. He later said that he made poor uses of his opportunities there. He went to work in an insurance office, but later enter…
Russell Miller (born c. 1938) is a British journalist and author of fifteen books, including biographies of Hugh Hefner, J. Paul Getty and L. Ron Hubbard. While under contract to The Sunday Times Maga…
Gardiner Harris covers international diplomacy for The New York Times. He previously served as a White House, South Asia, public health, and pharmaceutical reporter for the publication. Before working…
Skip Hollandsworth is an award-winning journalist, screenwriter, and executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine. His work was included in the 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2010 editions of Best American Crime…
Anna North is a novelist and journalist. She is the author of the novels Bog Queen (October 2025), Outlawed (a New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick), The Life and Death of Sophie Stark…
USA Today and New York Times bestseller author Ellery Adams has written over forty novels and can’t imagine spending a day away from the keyboard. Ms. Adams, a Native New Yorker, has had a lifelong lo…
I figured this bio was looking a little cobwebby, so here to update it a bit (January 2026). What's changed in the decade since I wrote my initial bio? Mmmm, not a lot. I still enjoy b…
T. Kingfisher is the vaguely absurd pen-name of Ursula Vernon. In another life, she writes children's books and weird comics, and has won the Hugo, Sequoyah, and Ursa Major awards, as well as a half-d…
Andrew L. Seidel is a constitutional attorney, the Director of Strategic Response at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and an author. Andrew graduated cum laude from Tulane University ('04) with a…
Ilise S. Carter is freelance writer, consulting copywriter to the beauty industry, and sideshow performer based in New York City. She has written for Allure, New York Times, Racked, Wall Street Journa…
