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Mary Morris was born in Chicago in 1947, and although she left to study at Tufts University and settled in the east, her hometown tie remained. Now a professor of…

In the 1980s, when Brian Seibert was growing up in suburban Los Angeles, he learned a few basic tap steps in dance class. As an adult in New York City,…

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, raised in New York City, found himself writing much of his second poetry collection in the mountains of Aspen, Colorado. He is a translator and critic with…

Orlando Patterson is a public intellectual and the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1969. Praised across the humanities as a Renaissance scholar,…

Karan Mahajan was born in Stamford, Connecticut and grew up in New Delhi. When he was 12, Kashmiri separatists set off a car bomb in a market a few miles…

Margot Lee Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Va., the daughter of two people with doctorates—Robert Benjamin Lee, a NASA research scientist, and Margaret G. Lee, a professor of English. But…

Peter Ho Davies grew up in Coventry, England, the son of a Welsh engineer and a Malaysian Chinese dentist. It’s a soccer saturated place, and Sook Ying Davies remembers carrying…

Tyehimba Jess grew up in Detroit, the son of a nurse educator and a director of laboratories for the city public health department. He thanks both Della Mae McGraw and…

Isabel Allende—novelist, feminist and philanthropist—is considered the most widely-read writer working in Spanish, having sold more than 67 million books. At 40, she burst upon the literary scene with her…

Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-1971) was among the most prominent sociologists, diplomats, civil rights and peace activists of the 20th century. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, but moved to California…

Charles Spurgeon Johnson was a sociologist and activist who, along with W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier (the first recipient of the John Anisfield Prize), is considered one of…

N. Scott Momaday – poet, watercolorist, novelist, scholar and storyteller – is the dean of Native American writers. He is a celebrated exemplar of the oral tradition and founder of…

Poet Shane McCrae was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up mostly in Texas and California. “I failed every class from sixth grade up,” he once said, but the poetry…

The novels of Jesmyn Ward create a fictional place – Bois Sauvage – rooted in her rural hometown on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The vividness of Bois Sauvage and…

Poet and public intellectual Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. His family moved often, but he grew up mostly in Topeka, Kansas, with regular jaunts to northern and southern…

The novelist Tommy Orange grew up in a city – Oakland, California – as the majority of Native American people do. “We know the sound of the freeway better than…

Tracy K. Smith, the daughter of an engineer and a teacher, is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Massachusetts, she grew up in northern California, where her four older…

Sonia Sanchez—poet, playwright, activist and educator—is an architect of the Black Arts Movement, a mid-20th century renewal of black will, energy and artist awareness. She has spent most of her…

Public intellectual Andrew Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, where he was honored with the Great Teacher Award by the Society of Columbia Graduates….

Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in Odessa, part of the former Soviet Union. When he was 4 years old, a doctor misdiagnosed his mumps as a cold and sent…