This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs of the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading. With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in the complexities of American history. The marriage of her white,...

Louise Glück is “a strong and haunting presence” among America’s greatest living poets. Her work is distinguished by a rare ability to deploy ostensibly simple language to evoke powerful emotion. While many of her poems clearly address the challenges of life and love in the contemporary world, they are at times informed by the themes and landscapes of classical mythology. She has published 12 volumes of verse to date, including The Seven Ages, Vita Novo, Triumph of Achilles and Averno. Her...

Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine in 1937 at the age of 16. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories began appearing in The New Yorker magazine. She published her first novel, The Lying Days in 1953. In her short stories and novels such as Burger's Daughter and July's People, she explored the...

In novels such as the modern classic, Beloved, Toni Morrison has fused history and legend, realism and fantasy, to craft an epic saga of African American life. Although her work is steeped in local history and folklore, the fundamental human values of her art have captured the hearts of readers around the world. After earning a Master's in English from Cornell University, Morrison taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. for many years, and first took up writing as a form of escape...

The most exciting and acclaimed playwright in American drama today, Suzan-Lori Parks is the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Audiences across the country relish her rich blend of fantasy, humor, history and legend, bursting with the music and wordplay of African American vernacular speech. The powerful theatricality of her work forces audiences to re-examine their thinking about race, sex, family, society and life itself. Her plays, Imperceptible Mutabilities...

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and sharp-tongued humor. It also introduced a distinctive approach to her favorite subjects: New York City, food, and the baffling ways of men and women in love. She was pregnant with her second child when her...

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and sharp-tongued humor. It also introduced a distinctive approach to her favorite subjects: New York City, food, and the baffling ways of men and women in love. She was pregnant with her second child when her...

Born and raised in a small town in rural Ireland, Edna O'Brien came to Dublin as a teenager to become a pharmacist, but a chance encounter with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helped her find her own voice as a writer. She completed her first novel, The Country Girls, in only a month when she was 23 years old. The book was banned in her native Ireland (the censor called it a libel on Irish womanhood), and a priest in her parish had the book burned, but thoughtful critics...

Sue Grafton is one of America's most popular mystery writers, the author of a series of best-sellers known as the alphabet mysteries, beginning with "A" is for Alibi and continuing through her latest, "U" is for Undertow due out in December 2009. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky and graduated from the University of Louisville. She was always interested in writing, but feared that she could never make a living at it. Her own father had published two mystery novels but died without...

In 1988, Amy Tan was earning an excellent living writing speeches for business executives. She worked around the clock to meet the demands from her many high-priced clients, but she took no joy in the work, and felt frustrated and unfulfilled. In her mid-thirties, she took up writing fiction. A year later her first book, a collection of interrelated stories called The Joy Luck Club was an international best-seller, and Amy Tan's life was changed forever. Only 20 years ago, a list of...

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most prolific and respected authors. She has distinguished herself in the academic world as teacher and critic, while earning a fortune as the author of best-selling novels in a wide range of genres, from the family chronicle to the historical novel, the gothic horror story and the suspense novel. Her work has been distinguished from the beginning by a keen, unflinching interest in the nature of evil and the sources of violence in American life. She...

The acclaimed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island. Her invalid mother encouraged her love of books, while her father shared her love of baseball; she traces her interest in history to her childhood experience recording the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A graduate of Colby College in Maine, with a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, she became a White House Fellow in 1967. Although she had recently published an...

In 1988, Amy Tan was earning an excellent living writing speeches for business executives. She worked around the clock to meet the demands from her many high-priced clients, but she took no joy in the work, and felt frustrated and unfulfilled. In her mid-thirties, she took up writing fiction. A year later her first book, a collection of interrelated stories called The Joy Luck Club was an international best-seller, and Amy Tan's life was changed forever. Only 20 years ago, a list of...

Rita Dove is one of America's best-known and most honored poets. Her collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah, based on the lives of her grandparents, earned her the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was only the second African-American to win this prize. In 1993, she was appointed to a two-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She was the youngest person, and the first African-American, to receive this highest official honor in...

Born Jean Marie Untinen in Chicago, she was the second of five children of a housepainter. Today, Jean Auel is a story-writing phenomenon whose series of novels set in prehistoric Europe have sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. A grandmother of nine, she put in 12 years of night school at the University of Portland; Jean Auel did not even try to write a book until she was past the age of 40. She quit work as a credit manager, and in 1977, "got the idea for a saga about a young woman's...

One of America's most respected and honored poets, Mona Van Duyn (1921 - 2004) served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1992 to 1993. Born and raised in rural Iowa, she was drawn to literature at an early age, but her parents were unsympathetic to her literary ambitions. At Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa), a sympathetic teacher encouraged her writing. She earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa, where she participated in the early years...

As a child, Maya Angelou was traumatized by abuse. For five years, she was silent, but in time, she found her voice, and that voice has been heard around the world. A single mother at age 16, she embarked on a remarkable career as an actress and entertainer, as a journalist, educator and civil rights activist, and finally, as one of the world's most eminent authors and poets. Her autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, created an international sensation when it was...