Renata Adler’s works of journalism include A Year in the Dark, Toward a Radical Middle, and Canaries in the Mineshaft, and she is the author of the novels Speedboat, winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, and Pitch Dark, both of which were reissued by NYRB Classics in 2013. She was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1963 to 2001.
Edward Albee, the American playwright, was born in 1928. His plays include A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women—all three of which won a Pulitzer Prize—as well as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which won a Tony Award for Best Play.
Hilton Als is the theater critic for the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1994. He is the author of The Women and White Girls, and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College.
Paul Auster is the best-selling author of The New York Trilogy and many other critically acclaimed novels. He has been awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Film Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. His work has been translated into more than forty languages.
Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, as well as The Splendid Things We Planned, a memoir about his family. He is at work on the authorized biography of Philip Roth. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize; and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Alison Bechdel is the author of the cult hit comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as two critically acclaimed graphic memoirs, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?
Tina Chang is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and the author of Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers. She is the co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and the New York Times.
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.
Deborah Eisenberg’s story collections include Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. She is the recipient of a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances and the story collection American Innovations. She is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction Writing and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among other distinctions. She writes regularly for the New Yorker, whose editors selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010.
A. M. Homes is the author of six novels, most recently May We Be Forgiven, two collections of stories, and the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter. Her fiction and essays have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, Granta, and One Story.
Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, The Impressionist, and Transmission. He is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, a Galaxy British Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize, and in 2003 Granta named him one of its twenty best young British novelists.
Rachel Kushner, a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, is the author of Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers, both of which were finalists for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Paris Review.
Wendy Lesser is a critic, novelist, and founding editor of the Threepenny Review. Lesser is the author of ten books, including Why I Read and the novel The Pagoda in the Garden.
D. T. Max, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is the author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery and Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.
Leigh Newman is the author of Still Points North, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She is the editor-at-large for Black Balloon Press and an editor at Oprah.com. She lives in Brooklyn.
Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. She is the author of the novel The Tiger’s Wife, and her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Harper’s, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, whose editors selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010.
Robert Pinsky, a former United States Poet Laureate, is the author of eight collections of poetry, including, most recently, his Selected Poems. His translation of The Inferno of Dante won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.
Katie Roiphe is the author of five books, including, most recently, In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays. She is Director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
George Saunders, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of several collections of short stories, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Story Prize.
David Shields’s books include Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet, and I Think You’re Totally Wrong. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade and emigrated to the United States in 1954. A former United States Poet Laureate, he is the author of more than thirty collections of poetry and the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith is also the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Award and a 2005 Whiting Award.
Mark Strand was a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, essayist, and translator. A former United States Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow, he was the author of many books of poems, a book of stories, and three volumes of translations, and he was the editor of several anthologies. The winner of a Bollingen Prize, Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. In 2014, he was named United States Poet Laureate.