Beryl Markham was a Kenyan aviator born in England (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. She was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Bri…
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The World That We Knew; The Marriage of Opposites; The Red Garden; The Museum of Extraordinary Things; The Dovekeepers; Here…
Blind and deaf since infancy, American memoirist and lecturer Helen Adams Keller learned to read, to write, and to speak from her teacher Anne Sullivan, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904, and lectured …
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…
I'm the product of a happy and uneventful childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland, followed by a happy and pretty eventful four years as a student at University of Michigan. From there, I wandered to th…
Jessica Simpson is an American singer, actress, philanthropist and fashion designer. Simpson rose to fame in the late 1990s starring with her then-husband Nick Lachey in the MTV reality show Newlyweds…
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, director of the Greater Good Science Center, and coeditor of Greater Good magazine. His research focuses on pro-s…
Jill Bolte Taylor is an American neuroanatomist, author, and public speaker. Her training is in the postmortem investigation of the human brain as it relates to schizophrenia and the severe mental ill…
Mark T. Sullivan (b. 1958) is an author of thrillers. Born in a Boston suburb, he joined the Peace Corp after college, traveling to West Africa to live with a tribe of Saharan nomads. Upon returning t…
White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in occupied Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has wri…
Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers "Fall and Rise," "13 Hours," "Lost in Shangri-La," and "Frozen in Time." His prev…
Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist, and professor who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, wh…
Elyn R. Saks, training to be a psychoanalyst, specializes in mental health law, criminal law, and children and the law. Her recent research focused on ethical dimensions of psychiatric research and fo…
Katherine May is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK. Her hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times became a New York Times, Su…
Rebecca Makkai is the author of 2023's New York Times bestselling I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, as well as the novels THE GREAT BELIEVERS, THE BORROWER and THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE, and the collection …
Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s essays and short stories have been published in The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, and the Sycamore Review. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations and a Notabl…
SCOTT JUREK is a world-renowned ultramarathon champion who trains and races on a vegan diet. He has prominently appeared in two New York Times bestsellers, Born to Run and The 4-Hour Body, and has bee…
Naoki Higashida (東田 直樹 Higashida Naoki) is the Japanese author of The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism. He was born in 1992 and diagnosed with autism when he was five. He was …
Born and raised in Central Florida, Cassie now makes her home on the banks of the Suwannee River in North Florida with her husband of twenty-five years and their tiny but terrifying chihuahua. A late-…
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atla…
Marie Benedict is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Daughter of Egypt, The Queens of Crime, The Mitford Affair, Her Hidden Genius, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, The Only Woman in …
Rachel wrote her first novel when she was twelve and entered it into a contest for young author/illustrators. Unfortunately, the judges weren’t impressed with her stick figures. So she dropped the dre…
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano Frankivsk, Soviet Union. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers. She studied to b…
Joshua Michael Peck is an American actor, comedian, and YouTuber. Peck began his career as a child actor in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and had an early role on The Amanda Show from 2000 to 2002. …
Antonia Hylton is the author of MADNESS: Race and Insanity in Jim Crow Asylum. She’s a Peabody and two-time Emmy award-winning Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC and the cohost of the hit podcasts S…