Author Bios

George M. Johnson is an author, journalist, and activist whose debut memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, published in 2020, became a celebrated and widely taught coming-of-age story about growing up Black and queer in New Jersey. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Johnson grew up in a close-knit family whose love and protection gave them the…

Saeed Jones is a poet and memoirist whose debut memoir How We Fight for Our Lives won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2019, the same year it was published to widespread critical acclaim. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1985 and raised in Lewisville, Texas, Jones grew up navigating the intersecting pressures of race, sexuality,…

Tiya Miles is an award-winning historian, professor, and author whose work examines the intersections of Native American and African American history. She holds the Michael Garvey Professorship of History at Harvard University and has been recognized as a MacArthur Fellow. Her scholarship brings rigorous archival research together with narrative skill to illuminate histories that have…

Sarah M. Broom is an author and journalist whose debut book The Yellow House won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, establishing her as a major voice in American memoir and place-writing. Born in 1979 in New Orleans East, Louisiana, Broom was the youngest of twelve children raised by her mother Ivory Mae in…

J.D. Vance is an author, venture capitalist, and politician whose 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis became one of the most discussed books of its era, offering an insider’s account of working-class white Appalachian culture amid economic decline. Born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984, in Middletown,…

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist, author, and journalist whose 2019 memoir Maybe You Should Talk to Someone became an immediate New York Times bestseller and one of the most widely read books about the inner life of therapy. Born in the United States, Gottlieb followed an unconventional path to her vocation: she worked as a…

Chanel Miller is an author and artist best known for her memoir Know My Name, published in 2019, which brought her into public consciousness after years of being identified only as “Emily Doe” — the anonymous sexual assault survivor whose victim impact statement in the Brock Turner case went viral in 2016 and was read…

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, legal scholar, and author whose 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness reshaped public discourse on race and criminal justice in America. Born in 1967, she grew up in a family that instilled in her a deep commitment to social justice, and…

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the twentieth-century American civil rights movement. His early life was marked by hardship: his father, a Baptist preacher and follower of Marcus Garvey, died under suspicious circumstances when Malcolm was six, and his…

Patrick Radden Keefe is the finest long-form journalist and narrative nonfiction writer of his generation, an author whose books and magazine pieces for The New Yorker combine the investigative depth of the best journalism with the novelistic architecture and psychological acuity of literary fiction. Born in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts, he was educated at Columbia…