Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and author best known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008. In 2006 she published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a critically acclaimed autobiography, which became a New York Times best-seller and was named one of Time magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year. She continues to illustrate for websites and magazines, including Ms., Slate, and the Advocate.
Stephen Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he teaches courses on law and religion, the ethics of war, contracts, intellectual property, and professional responsibility. He has written numerous nonfiction books, and his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, became a New York Times best-seller.
Junot Díaz received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; his other books include Drown (1996). Díaz, who moved to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic in his early childhood, is professor of writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rebecca Goldstein’s books include Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, and Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. In 1996 she became a MacArthur Fellow.
Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Time, and the New Republic on topics such as language and politics, the neural basis of consciousness, and the genetic enhancement of human beings. His books include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
Lev Grossman is a book critic and technology writer for Time magazine. After the international acclaim of his novel Codex, he published his third novel, The Magicians, which quickly became a New York Times best-seller.
Sophie Gee is an assistant professor of English at Princeton, where she teaches courses on eighteenth-century poetry and novels and on the history of satire. Her first novel, The Scandal of the Season, was named one of the best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the Economist. Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.
Jonathan Lethem is a novelist and short story writer who has contributed to Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, and Harper’s, among other publications. His 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and in 2003 The Fortress of Solitude became a New York Times best-seller. In 2005 Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Claire Messud is writer in residence at Tulane University. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her collection of novellas, The Hunters, were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children, was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year for 2006 by the New York Times Book Review.
James Wood is a literary critic and novelist. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff critic at the New Yorker. He is the author of three books of criticism and an autobiographical novel, The Book Against God (2003).
Leah Price is professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000) and How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012).
Philip Pullman is the author of nearly twenty books, his most well-known work being the trilogy His Dark Materials. The second of these books, The Amber Spyglass, was the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and his other books have garnered accolades including the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Book Award.
Gary Shteyngart is the author of three novels and is a frequent contributor to such publications as the New Yorker, Slate, and the New York Times. His first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award, and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.
Edmund White’s works include novels, autobiographical sketches, and social commentary, specifically focusing on gay identity in America and the effects of AIDS on society. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, White is best known for his biography of the French writer Jean Genet, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994.