American musician Louis Armstrong, known as Satchmo, a virtuoso trumpeter and popular, gravelly voiced singer, greatly influenced the development of jazz.
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…
John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981; he also wrote The Neon…
JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached …
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of…
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan…
Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the An…
James McBride is a native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools. He studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Masters in Journalism from Co…
Jane Jacobs, OC, O.Ont (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-born Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Dea…
With warm, muted style on albums, such as Kind of Blue (1959), noted American trumpeter Miles Dewey Davis, Junior, later experimented with jazz-fusion.
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 col…
Born Jane Sydney Auer, Jane Bowles's total body of work consists of one novel, one play, and six short stories. Yet John Ashbery said of her: "It is to be hoped that she will be recognized for what sh…
Charles Mingus Jr. (born April 22, 1922 in Nogales, Arizona – died January 5, 1979 in Cuernavaca, Mexico) was an American jazz upright bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, and author.
Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, CBE, universally known by his stage name Sting, is a Grammy Award-winning English musician from Wallsend in Newcastle upon Tyne. Prior to starting his solo career, he was…
PATTI SMITH is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has…
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Revie…
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…
David Eric Grohl is an American musician. He rose to fame as the drummer for the grunge band Nirvana and sustained a high level of post-Nirvana with the alternative rock band Foo Fighters. He is also …
Lauretta Ngcobo (born 1931) was a South African novelist and essayist. After being in exile between 1963 and 1994, she lived in Durban until her death in November 2015.
Ronell Eugene Stallworth is an American retired police officer who infiltrated the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs in the late 1970s. He was the first African-American police officer and…
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…
Sarah E. Hill, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology and a leading researcher in the dynamic and rapidly expanding field of evolutionary psychology.
Larry Mitchell (1939 – December 26, 2012) was an American author and publisher. He was the founder of Calamus Books - an early small press devoted to gay male literature - and the author of fiction de…
