Val Brelinski was born and raised in Nampa, Idaho, the daughter of devout evangelical Christians. She is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where she was also a Jones Lecturer in fiction wri…
Born Dorothy Gladys Smith in Lancashire, England, Dodie Smith was raised in Manchester (her memoir is titled A Childhood in Manchester). She was just an infant when her father died, and she grew up fa…
Darrin Bell is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American editorial cartoonist and comic strip creator known for the syndicated comic strips Candorville and Rudy Park. He is a syndicated editorial cartoonist w…
Karen Russell graduated from Columbia University's MFA program in 2006. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zo…
Kerry Isabelle Greenwood was an Australian author and lawyer. She wrote many plays and books, most notably a string of historical detective novels centred on the character of Phryne Fisher, which was …
I was born in 1967 in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C. and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia...At aroun…
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She recently misapplied her professors' hard work to…
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the no…
Simon Van Booy is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, including The Illusion of Separateness and The Presence of Absence. Simon is the editor of t…
Anna Carey has been a gift wrapper, face painter, nanny, horrific cocktail waitress, sofa saleswoman and children's book editor. She graduated from New York University and has an MFA in fiction from B…
Nujood Ali, born in 1998, is a figure of Yemen's fight against forced marriage. At the age of ten, she obtained a divorce, breaking with the tribal tradition. In November 2008, U.S. women's magazine G…
Clare Vanderpool, recipient of the 2011 Newbery Award, is a resident of Wichita, Kansas. She has a degree in English and Elementary Education and enjoys reading, going to the pool with her children, t…
Rachel Joyce has written over 20 original afternoon plays for BBC Radio 4, and major adaptations for both the Classic Series, Woman's Hour and also a TV drama adaptation for BBC 2. In 2007 she won the…
Liz Moore is the author of the novels THE WORDS OF EVERY SONG (Broadway Books, 2007), HEFT (W.W. Norton, 2012), THE UNSEEN WORLD (W.W. Norton, 2016), and the New York Times-bestselling Long Bright …
Mike Carey is the acclaimed writer of Lucifer and Hellblazer (now filmed as Constantine). He has recently completed a comics adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and is the current writer on Marvel…
E.K. Johnston had several jobs and one vocation before she became a published writer. If she’s learned anything, it’s that things turn out weird sometimes, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. W…
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with t…
Chelsea Bieker is the author of three books, most recently the national bestselling novel, Madwoman, a Book of the Month club pick the New York Times calls “brilliant in its depiction of the long shad…
Suzanne Park is a Korean-American writer who was born and raised in Tennessee. In her former life as a stand-up comedian, she was a finalist in the Oxygen Network's "Girls Behaving Badly" talent searc…
Rachel Beanland is the author of the novels FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE, and the forthcoming THE HALF LIFE, which will be released by Simon & Schuster in the summer of 2026. She…
Katherine Lin is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Harper in 2023. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.
Sylvie Cathrall writes stories of hope and healing with healthy doses of wonder and whimsy. She holds a graduate degree in odd Victorian art and has handled more than a few nineteenth-century letters …
