Author, screenwriter, philanthropist, journalist, and broadcaster Mitch Albom is an inspiration around the world. His fiction and non-fiction books — which include 8 #1 New York Times bestsellers — ha…
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) bro…
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…
Kim Edwards grew up in Skaneateles, New York, in the heart of the Finger Lakes region. The oldest of four children, she graduated from Colgate University and the University of Iowa, where she received…
Dr. Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was an African-American poet and author. She wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her most known poems is "For My People".
Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an American Black Muslim minister and a spokesman for the Nation of Islam.
After leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, he mad…
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and lives in England, where he teaches at the University of Kent. The most famous of his novels are Paradise, shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whi…
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before earning an MPhil from Oxford and an MFA from…
As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio.…
From working on college campuses, to sharing the Gospel behind the Iron Curtain as a missionary, traveling around the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia to speak on di…
Clay Clarkson is director of Whole Heart Ministries, a nonprofit family ministry he and his wife, Sally, started in 1994 to help Christian parents raise wholehearted children for Christ. He is the aut…
Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007; Fence: 2011), and MERCURY (Fence: forthcoming fall 2011), plus the LP/audiobook SAVE THE WORLD…
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow, Coates has received the National…
Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning New York Times and internationally bestselling author of historical novels which explore the defining events of the 20th century. A recipient of the 2015 RNA Historica…
Like many of my siblings, I would sneak out of bed, slip into the hallway, and pull my favorite books from the book closet. I read my way through the bottom shelf, then the next shelf up, and the shel…
Samantha Silva is the author of Mr. Dickens and His Carol (2017), Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft (2021), both from Flatiron Books, and Sometime This Century, coming June 2026 from Harpe…
Ainsley Arment is the founder of Wild + Free, co-founder of Wild Explorers Club and the Wild + Free Farm Village, and host of the weekly Wild + Free podcast. She and her husband Ben are raising their …
JAMIE ERICKSON is a former classroom teacher turned homeschool mom. When she’s not curating memories, hoarding vintage books, or playing ringmaster to a circus of her own making, Jamie can be found en…
