Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Knight Program in Science and En…
Elizabeth Wurtzel was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer best known for her groundbreaking memoir Prozac Nation, published when she was just 27. Her writing, often deeply personal and confessi…
Susanna Kaysen is an American author best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted, based on her experiences at McLean Hospital. Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she is the daughter of econo…
Judith Butler is an American philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist whose work has profoundly shaped gender studies, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Born in Cleve…
John O'Donohue, Ph.D., was born in County Clare in 1956. He spoke Irish as his native language and lived in a remote cottage in the west of Ireland until his untimely death in January 2008. A highly r…
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received…
George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at…
Julian Jaynes was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which he argued that consciousness is a cultural development …
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an American journalist whose works focus on the marginalized members of society: adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, and women in prison. She grew up in a working-clas…
Kay Redfield Jamison (born June 22, 1946) is an American clinical psychologist and writer who is one of the foremost experts on bipolar disorder. She is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Un…
Annie G. Rogers is a writer and Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in Ireland, and a Radcliffe …
Andrea Faye Gibson was an American poet and activist. Their poetry focused on gender norms, politics, social justice, LGBTQ topics, life, and mortality. Gibson was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Co…
Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Beautyland (Best Books of 2024 (So Far) NYTimes, TIME Magazine, Esquire, Elle)), Parakeet (NYTimes Editor's Ch…
Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State; the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize; and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. She teaches wr…
Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among oth…
Baek Se-hee (Korean: 백세희) was a South Korean author best known for her memoir, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (2018), and its sequel, I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki (2019…
Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into a research library or the wilderness. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure J…
Marian Schembari's first byline was at age eleven in Highlights for Kids. It was a poem about dragons. Since then, Marian’s essays about travel, friendship, money, and love have appeared in The New Yo…