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William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of only 20 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member.

‘Burnt Shadows,’ her fifth novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction and won the Danish Literature Prize ALOA-2010.

Most recently, she composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

A MacArthur Fellow and winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Professor Marshall has taught at various universities over the course of her lifetime.

Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory […] and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure.

Professor Gordon-Reed, who grew up in still-segregated east Texas, became interested in Jefferson in elementary school after reading a children’s biography of him, narrated by a fictional slave boy.

Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified.

At Harvard College, he studied with John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish, winning the Dana Read Prize in 1960 for the best piece of writing in any Harvard undergraduate publication.

After September 11, the war in Afghanistan and the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, Hamid took a leave of absence from his McKinsey & Company job and returned to Pakistan, where he worked as a freelance journalist and on his second novel, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist.’

His first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award for best fiction of 2007, the Mercantile Library Center’s John Sargent Prize for First Novel in 2007, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Apart from feelings of guilt over van Gogh’s death, her voice is forceful and unbowed—like Irshad Manji, she delivers a powerful feminist critique of Islam informed by a genuine understanding of the religion.

Steel Drivin’ Man, which explores the real life and legend of railway hero John Henry, received the Merle Curti Prize for best hook in U.S. social and cultural history from the Organization of American Historians and the National Award for Arts Writing.

‘Blue Front,’ the book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old in Cairo, Illinois, was also chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library and won an Ohioana Book Award.

Her second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” also the title of one of her short stories, is set before and during the Biafran War.

‘On Beauty’ was recognized with the Orange Prize for Fiction and The Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasia Section). In addition, the novel was short listed for the Man Booker Prize and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2005.

In addition to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, “New York Burning” was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Writing these novels was as often as not a sobering learning experience. “Beetlecreek” taught me that Truth is seldom a blazing billboard of light, but as often as not the revelation of a gentle unfolding flower.

These works explore the heritage and experience of African-Americans, decade-by-decade, over the course of the twentieth century.

The word “macnolia,” he tellingly suggests, means “a Negro who spells and reads as well as [if not better than] any white”—and it gives him a convincing way to concentrate on an individual life while also exploring social attitudes and racial prejudices of Depression-era America.

‘The Dew Breaker’ is a beautifully constructed novel that spirals back to the reformed prison guard at the end, while holding unanswered the question of redemption.