Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); …
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master…
Writer and diarist, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anaïs Nin spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in P…
Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she …
Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing pro…
Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highligh…
Alice Randall (born Detroit, Michigan) is an American author and songwriter. Randall grew up in Washington, D.C.. She attended Harvard University, where she earned an honors degree in English and Amer…
I've loved books since I was 3, and the library was a highlight of my childhood. I've been fortunate to be able to find great joy in what others have written and sometimes to give this to readers. I f…
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction…
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, wh…
Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British movement of the abolition for the slave trade. Although enslaved as a young man, he purcha…
Becky Spratford [MLIS] is a Librarian in Illinois specializing in serving patrons ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local publi…
Tiya Miles is from Ohio, "the heart of it all," though now she spends summers in her husband's native Montana. She is the author of All That She Carried (which won a National Book Award for nonfiction…
Monique Roffey, FRSL, is an award winning British-Trinidadian writer. Her most recent novel, Passiontide, (Harvill, 2024), a crime thriller and protest novel, was a finalist for the prestigious US Car…
Michelle Obama served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama started her career as an attorney at the Chicago law f…
Gloria Furman (MACE, Dallas Theological Seminary) is a wife, mother of four, cross-cultural worker, and writer. In 2008 her family moved to the Middle East to plant Redeemer Church of Dubai where her …
Works of poetry, history, and fiction, such as God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936), established American writer Arna Wendell Bontemps as a leading figure of the renaissance of Har…
Jemar Tisby is president and co-founder of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective. He has written about race, religion, and culture for The Washington Post, CNN, Vox, Christianity Today and The New…
