Author Bios

Brené Brown is a research professor, author, and speaker whose work on vulnerability, shame, and human connection has made her one of the most influential voices in American popular psychology and leadership development. Born on November 18, 1965, in San Antonio, Texas, Brown grew up in New Orleans and Houston before earning her undergraduate degree…

Greg McKeown is a British-American author, speaker, and leadership strategist best known for his 2014 book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which became an international bestseller and a foundational text in the productivity and personal effectiveness space. Born in the United Kingdom and educated at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, McKeown has advised…

Joan Didion was one of the defining literary voices of twentieth-century America — a journalist, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter whose cool, precise, psychologically penetrating prose helped invent what we now think of as the New Journalism and shaped a generation of writers who learned from her how to bring novelistic technique to nonfiction. Born on…

Lindo Bacon (formerly Linda Bacon) is an American researcher, author, and advocate who developed the Health at Every Size (HAES) framework, a paradigm shift in the approach to health and body weight that has influenced clinicians, researchers, and public health practitioners worldwide. Bacon holds a Ph.D. in physiology and has held research and faculty positions…

Lindsay C. Gibson is an American clinical psychologist and author whose book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents, published in 2015, became an unexpected and sustained bestseller in the self-help genre, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and helping to define the popular conversation about emotional…

Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an American author and historian whose book Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past examines the ways that Los Angeles systematically erased and romanticized its Mexican and indigenous heritage in the process of becoming a major American city. His work sits at the…

Heidi Neumark is an American Lutheran pastor and author whose memoir Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (2003) is a beloved account of her nearly two decades of ministry in one of the poorest and most neglected urban communities in America. Neumark served as pastor of Transfiguration Lutheran Church in the Hunts…

Steven Watts is an American cultural historian and professor whose books examine significant figures in American popular and business culture through the lens of social history. He is a professor of history at the University of Missouri, where he has taught American history and cultural studies for many years. His work is noted for its…

Robert Strauss is an American journalist and author who has written extensively about politics, baseball, and American culture. Based in the Philadelphia area, Strauss has worked as a reporter and contributor to major newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Sports Illustrated. His journalism has focused…

Robin Wasserman is an American author whose work spans young adult fiction, adult literary fiction, and cultural criticism. She is best known in the YA world for her Skinned trilogy — comprising Skinned (2008), Crashed (2009), and Wired (2010) — a science fiction series exploring questions of consciousness, identity, and what it means to be…