Author Bios

Donna Rifkind is an American literary critic and author whose biography The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, published in 2020, was named a best book of the year by the Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Book Council, and other outlets. Rifkind has been a book…

Jill Santopolo is an American author and children’s book editor whose adult debut novel The Light We Lost, published in 2017, became a major international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages and praised for its emotionally devastating portrait of a decades-long love story. Born in New York, Santopolo earned her B.A. from Columbia University…

Emily Maloney is an American writer and registered nurse whose debut essay collection Cost of Living, published in 2022, received strong critical acclaim for its sharp, compassionate examination of the American healthcare system from the perspective of a psychiatric-unit worker who is also a patient carrying significant medical debt. Her essays bring together the personal…

Nicole Chung is a Korean American author and editor whose memoir All You Can Ever Know, published in 2018, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and is widely regarded as one of the finest memoirs about transracial adoption in American literature. Born in Oregon in 1981, Chung was adopted…

Patrick Bringley is an American author and former museum guard whose memoir All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, published in 2023, was celebrated as a tender and illuminating account of grief, art, and the quiet life of a cultural institution. A graduate of Princeton University, Bringley had been…

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright whose work — rooted in questions of Muslim American identity, capitalism, and belonging — has made him one of the most acclaimed American writers of his generation. Born in Staten Island, New York, in 1970, to Pakistani immigrant parents, Akhtar grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and went on…

Grace M. Cho is a sociologist and author whose memoir Tastes Like War, published in 2021, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and was widely praised for its innovative blend of memoir, food writing, cultural theory, and Korean history. Cho is a professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY,…

Claudia Rankine is one of the most important poets and essayists working in America today, known for hybrid works that dissolve the boundaries between poetry, prose, and visual art in order to examine race, citizenship, and what it means to inhabit a Black body in the United States. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963, she…

Amy Stanley is an historian and author whose book Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, published in 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, where she teaches Japanese…

Jennifer Teege is a German-Nigerian author whose memoir My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, published in Germany in 2013 and in English translation in 2015, became an internationally recognized account of one of modern history’s most harrowing personal discoveries. Born in Munich in 1970 to a German…