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…
Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for his 2003 novel The Known World.
Collections of short stories of noted Canadian writer Alice Munro of life in rural Ontario include Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Moons of Jupiter (1982); for these and vivid novels, she…
Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a c…
Ralph Ellison was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, w…
Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The …
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
John Jeremiah Sullivan is an American writer and editor. He is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and southern editor of The Paris Review…
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considere…
Beverly Jenkins is the recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in 1967 and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her work examines culture, religion, race, and family. Her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue (200…
Nettie P. Jones (1941-) is an award winning writer and educator who is best known for her novels Fish Tales (1984) and Mischief Makers (1989, 1991). Jones is retired from New York University, where sh…
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…
JUSTIN TORRES grew up in upstate New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a recipien…
Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA…
NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39 in 2014. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for…
