Christina Sinatra is an American businesswoman, producer, talent agent, actress, singer and author.
Miranda Jane Seymour is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer. The lives she has described have included those of Robert Graves and Mary Shelley. Seymour, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has in recent years been a visiting Professor of English Studies at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Michele L. Norris is an American journalist. Since 2019, Norris has worked as an opinion columnist with The Washington Post. She is best known for co-hosting National Public Radio's evening news program All Things Considered from 2002-2011. She was the first African-American female host for NPR. Before that Norris was a correspondent for ABC News, as well as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Norris is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Helene Cooper is a Liberian-born American journalist who is a Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times. Before that, she was the paper's White House correspondent in Washington, D.C. She joined the Times in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor.
Marie Arana is an author, editor, journalist, critic, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and a Professor of English at Tulane University, where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel Salvage the Bones and won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. She also received a 2012 Alex Award for the story about familial love and community in facing Hurricane Katrina. She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. All three of Ward's novels are set in the fictitious Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
Hard Choices is a memoir of former United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, published by Simon & Schuster in 2014, giving her account of her tenure in that position from 2009 to 2013. It also discusses some personal aspects of her life and career, including her feelings towards President Barack Obama following her 2008 presidential campaign loss to him. It is generally supportive of decisions made by the Obama administration.
Joan Morgan is a Jamaican-American author and journalist. She was born in Jamaica and raised in the South Bronx. Morgan coined the term "hip hop feminist".
Jessica B. Harris is an American culinary historian, college professor, cookbook author and journalist. She is professor emerita at Queens College, City University of New York, where she taught for 50 years, and is also the author of 15 books, including cookbooks, non-fiction food writing and memoir. She has twice won James Beard Foundation Awards, including for Lifetime Achievement in 2020, and her book High on the Hog was adapted in 2021 as a four-part Netflix series by the same name.
Deborah Feldman is an American-born German writer living in Berlin. Her 2012 autobiography, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, tells the story of her escape from an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, New York, and was the basis of the 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox.
Boys in the Trees is a memoir by American singer-songwriter Carly Simon.
Nina Ellen Riggs was an American writer and poet. Her best known work is her memoir, The Bright Hour, detailing her journey as a mother with incurable breast cancer. It was published shortly after her death. The book received critical acclaim. Riggs also contributed an article to New York Times series Modern Love.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2020.
Soraya Nadia McDonald is an American writer and culture critic. She was previously a reporter at The Washington Post, and has been the culture critic for The Undefeated since 2016. McDonald was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For is a 2019 nonfiction book published by Simon & Schuster by Susan Rice, who had served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations and as National Security Adviser under President Barack Obama.
Nadia Adjoa Owusu is an American writer and memoirist. She won a 2019 Whiting Award for her memoir Aftershocks.
Subsequent to her loss of the 2016 United States presidential election, Hillary Clinton retired from electoral politics and has since engaged in a number of activities.
Safiya Sinclair is a Jamaican poet and memoirist. Her debut poetry collection, Cannibal, won several awards, including a Whiting Award for poetry in 2016 and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for poetry in 2017. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University.
