Author Bios

Arkady Martine is an American science fiction author and Byzantine historian whose debut novel announced a major new talent in contemporary speculative fiction. Writing under a pen name, she holds a PhD in Byzantine history and has taught at universities including Johns Hopkins University, bringing a scholar’s rigorousness to the political and cultural structures she…

Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed British science fiction and fantasy authors working today. Born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, he studied zoology and psychology at the University of Reading before pursuing a career in law, working as a lawyer and legal eagle in Leeds for many years while simultaneously building…

Liu Cixin is China’s most celebrated science fiction author, widely regarded as the most important voice in contemporary Chinese speculative fiction. Born in 1963 in Yangquan, Shanxi province, he grew up during a period of enormous social and political upheaval in China, an experience that would deeply inform his sweeping, cosmologically ambitious storytelling. He spent…

Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrant working-class parents. He grew up in Brooklyn tenements, worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and various shipyards as a young man, served as a bombardier in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II—an experience that…

Nathaniel Philbrick was born on June 11, 1956, in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Pittsburgh before his family moved to New England. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Brown University and his master’s degree in American literature from Duke University, and has been a resident of Nantucket, Massachusetts, for most of his adult life—a…

David McCullough was born on July 7, 1933, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and earned his bachelor’s degree in English literature from Yale University in 1955. He worked as a writer and editor at Time-Life Books and other publications before turning to full-length narrative history, publishing his first book, The Johnstown Flood, in 1968. That book, which…

Jack McIver Weatherford was born in 1945 in South Carolina and earned his doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. He spent his career as a professor of anthropology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, retiring after more than two decades of teaching. His academic work focused on the political economy…

Samuel C. Gwynne was born in 1953 and built his career in journalism, working as a reporter and editor at outlets including Time magazine and the Dallas Morning News, where he spent years as executive editor. His journalism was distinguished by narrative ambition and a talent for making complex institutional and historical subjects accessible to…

Doris Kearns Goodwin was born on January 4, 1943, in Rockville Centre, New York, and grew up on Long Island as a passionate baseball fan—her father taught her to keep score at Brooklyn Dodgers games—and a voracious reader of history. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Colby College and her PhD in government from Harvard…

Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in DeLisle, Mississippi, a small community on the Gulf Coast that she has called Bois Sauvage in her fiction and that anchors much of her imaginative world. She grew up in a working-class Black family in rural Mississippi, witnessed the economic disinvestment and racial violence that shaped her community,…