About the Authors
Michael Chabon is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, collections of short stories and essays, and a young-adult novel. Titles include Wonder Boys, which was made into a critically acclaimed film; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, among others.
Ayelet
Waldman is an essayist and author of several books including Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and The New York Times bestseller
Bad
Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments
of Grace. Her personal essays and profiles of such public figures as
Hillary Clinton have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and
magazines, including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and
The Wall Street Journal. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a
former criminal defense lawyer. Waldman currently lives in Berkeley, California
with her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband Michael Chabon, their four children,
and their Bernese mountain dog Fanny.
Kirsten Potter has won several awards, including more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and been a three-time finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. Her work has been recognized by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and by AudioFile magazine, among many others. She graduated with highest honors from Boston University and has performed on stage and in film and television, including roles on Medium, Bones, and Judging Amy.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for First Novel, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Jacqueline Woodson, named national Young People’s Poet Laureate, is a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen acclaimed books for young adults, middle graders, and children. She won the 2019 Indie Champion Award for advocacy of independent bookstores. Among her many other honors are the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the NAACP Image Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, among others. She is the 2018 winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for “substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.” She was the 2013 United States nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award.
Ann Patchett is the author of eight novels, four works of nonfiction, and two children’s books. Several of her books have been New York Times bestsellers, with Commonwealth reaching the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Women’s Prize in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year, and The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the co-owner of Parnassus Books.
Brit Bennett was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Stanford University. She later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and Jezebel.
Geraldine Brooks is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March and numerous New York Times bestsellers. Caleb's Crossing won the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Christianity Today Book Award and was a finalist for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Berkeley, California.
Dave Eggers is the author of twelve books, including A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award, and What Is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of France’s Prix Médicis Étranger and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Guardian, the New Yorker, and the Best American Essays. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and cofounder of Voice of Witness, a book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. He is the cofounder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers with locations around the country, and of ScholarMarch, which connects donors with students to make college accessible. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and the author of nine other books, including three New York Times bestsellers. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book.
Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction and recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.
Emily Janice Card (a.k.a. Emily Rankin) is an actor, writer, and singer. In addition to being a narrator, she has directed numerous audiobooks, including the 2007 Audie and Earphones Award winner Hubris, Legacy of Ashes by Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, and Them by Nathan McCall. Her own audiobook narration has won her four Earphones Awards.
Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of Translation Nation and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The
Question of Bruno, which appeared on Best Books of 2000 lists
nationwide, won several literary awards, and was published in eighteen
countries, as well as of Nowhere Man
and The Lazarus Project, which was a
finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Born in Sarajevo, Hemon arrived in Chicago in 1992, began writing in English in
1995, and now his work appears regularly in the New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, Paris
Review, and Best American Short Stories.
Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, the #1 New York Times bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton, and the New York Times bestseller The Burgess Boys, as well as Abide with Me, a Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including the New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine.
Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an American-Israeli writer, poet, and novelist. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Arabic and political science. A recipient of a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature, his work has been published in the New York Times, Haaretz, and elsewhere.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, among others. He lives in New York City.
Salman Rushdie is the author of a collection of short stories, a collection of essays, and fourteen novels, including Midnight's Children, which won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker. He has also published four works of nonfiction and coedited two anthologies. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, hewas knighted in 2007 for services to literature.
Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, as well as the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists.
Jennifer Egan, the author of several books of fiction, is the recipient of the 2019 New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association’s 2019 Legacy Award for lifetime achievement. Her works including the New York Times bestseller Manhattan Beach, as well as A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Books Critics Circle Award; The Keep, a national bestseller; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award finalist; and The Invisible Circus, which was adapted into a major motion picture. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, McSweeney’s, the New York Times Magazine, and many others.
Scott Turow is the author of nonfiction and bestselling works of fiction, including Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof, which reached the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. His books have been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide and have been adapted into movies and television projects. He has frequently contributed essays and op-ed pieces to publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and The Atlantic.
Victor LaValle is the award-winning author of The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and Slapboxing with Jesus. Big Machine was the winner of an American Book Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2010, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, the Nation, and Publishers Weekly. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York.
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the nonfiction book, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He teaches at Yale University.
Neil Gaiman is the author of several #1 New York Times bestsellers, including Norse Mythogy, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and Anansi Boys, and others, as well as the Sandman series of graphic novels. His fiction has received Newbery, Carnegie, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. His novel American Gods aired as a TV series in 2017. Originally from England, he lives in the United States, where he is a professor at Bard College.
Jesmyn Ward is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. Her memoir Men We Reaped was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University.
George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; and others. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
Marlon James is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf. His book A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker Prize, the American Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Night Women won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the NAACP Image Award. He is a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
William Finnegan is the author of several books, including the memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. He has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1987.
Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize.
Charlie Jane Anders is an American journalist, editor, and fiction writer. Her novel Choir Boy
won a Lambda Literary Award in 2005. She lives in the San Francisco Bay
Area, where she is managing editor of the science fiction website io9.com.
Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers Less and The Confessions of Max Tivoli Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Louise Erdrich is a multiaward–winning author of Native American descent. She twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, for her debut novel, Love Medicine, and for LaRose. The Plague of Doves, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Many of her books have made the New York Times bestsellers list. She has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the World Fantasy Award, and American Academy of Poets Prize, among many other honors. She has also written poetry, children’s books, short stories, a memoir, and other works of nonfiction.
About the Narrators
Lorie Kellogg is a busy graphic and voice-over artist as well as a skilled improv comedian. She studied painting, printmaking, and video and film at the Kansas City Art Institute and the California Institute of the Arts.
Judith Light is
a two-time Tony Award–winning actress, winning Best Performance by a Featured
Actress in a Play for both The Assembled
Parties and Other Desert Cities.
She also won Drama Desk Awards for both of these roles. Judith’s television
career began with the role of Karen Wolek on One Life to Live, for which she won two “Best Actress” Emmy Awards.
She has many more stage, film, and television roles to her credit as well.
Patrick Stewart is a renowned stage actor with the RSC and the National Theatre, performing on Broadway and London's West End, winner of Best Actor Award for Antony and Cleopatra. He is perhaps best known for major feature films including Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Conspiracy Theory, X-Men, and most recently X-Men 2.
Michael C. Hall is an American actor, known for his award-winning role as Dexter Morgan in the Showtime television series Dexter and as David Fisher in the HBO drama series Six Feet Under. He has also starred in nearly a dozen major off-Broadway plays, including Macbeth for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and he performs in independent motion pictures. His audiobook narrations have earned him an AudioFile Earphones Award.
Norbert Leo Butz is an American actor, singer, and narrator best known for his work in Broadway theater. He is a two-time winner of the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical and is one of only nine actors ever to have won the award twice as lead actor.
LeVar Burton is an Emmy Award–winning actor, presenter, director, author, and Earphones Award–winning narrator. He is best known for his roles as the host of the long-running PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow, as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as the young Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries Roots. He has also directed a number of television episodes for various iterations of Star Trek, among other programs. He was named 2017’s Best Male Literary Citizen by Literary Hub and is a 2020 recipient of the Ember Award for unsung contributions to literature.
Brian d’Arcy James is an American actor and musician whose on and off Broadway credits include Time Stands Still, Sweet Smell of Success, The Good Thief, Titanic, and Shrek. In 2009, his performance as Shrek in Shrek the Musical earned him his second Tony nomination. He is also an accomplished concert performer and has had the honor of performing for President Clinton and for President Obama and the First Family. He currently resides in New York City with his wife and daughter.
Zondervan, part of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, is a
world leading Bible publisher and provider of Christian communications. For
more than eighty years, Zondervan has delivered transformational Christian
experiences through its bestselling Bibles, books, curriculum, academic
resources, and digital products. The company’s products are sold in multiple formats,
worldwide in more than sixty countries, and translated into nearly two hundred
languages.
Heather Alicia Simms is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, finalist for an Audie Award, and an actress. Her filmography includes Broken Flowers, Flutter Kick, Shock Act, Kingscounty, Head of State, Third Watch, and others. She also provided voice acting for the video game Red Dead Revolver.
Zachary Quinto grew up in Pittsburgh. He has had guest starring roles on such shows as Touched By an Angel, CSI, Six Feet Under, and Crossing Jordan. In 2004, he spent an entire season as computer analyst Adam Kaufman on FOX’s highly rated drama 24. He is best known to date for his role as Sylar, the super powered psychopathic serial killer on the NBC smash hit series Heroes. In May 2009, Quinto appeared as Spock in the blockbuster reboot of the Star Trek franchise, directed by J. J. Abrams. He lives in Los Angeles.