Author Bios

Brian Broome was born in 1972 and grew up in Warren, Ohio, a post-industrial city in the northeastern part of the state that had seen its steel industry collapse and much of its economic and social fabric fray. He grew up Black and gay in a working-class environment where neither of those identities had much…

Kate Moore is a bestselling author and editor whose work focuses on untold stories of history, particularly the experiences of women whose contributions and suffering have been overlooked or suppressed in conventional historical accounts. She studied at Brigham Young University and has worked in publishing as an author and editor, developing a particular expertise in…

Glennon Doyle was born in 1976 in Burke, Virginia, and grew up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs in a family she has described as loving but ill-equipped to help her manage the anxiety, bulimia, and alcoholism that took hold in her adolescence and early adulthood. She attended Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and struggled…

Michelle McNamara was born on December 26, 1970, in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and grew up with what she later described as a lifelong obsession with true crime rooted in a specific event: the 1984 murder of a neighborhood girl, Kathleen Lombardo, whose killer was never identified. That unsolved crime lodged itself in…

Natasha Trethewey was born on April 26, 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi, to a Black mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, and a white Canadian father, Eric Trethewey, a poet who would later teach at universities in the American South. Born in a state where their parents’ interracial marriage was still illegal under Mississippi law—the wedding took place…

Kiese Laymon was born in 1974 and grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, raised primarily by his mother, Linda Laymon, a political science professor whose demanding, complicated love forms the emotional center of his memoir. He attended Millsaps College in Jackson before transferring to Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, and later…

Isabel Wilkerson was born in 1961 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of parents who had migrated from the South as part of the Great Migration—the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North that reshaped American society between 1910 and 1970. She studied journalism at Howard University and went on…

Susanna Clarke was born on November 1, 1959, in Nottingham, England, and grew up in various parts of northern England and Scotland as the daughter of a Methodist minister. She read history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1981, and subsequently worked as a cookery book editor in Turin and as an English language…

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago. His father was a physician and his mother a musician, and he was raised in a comfortable but emotionally complicated household. He excelled at English and journalism at Oak Park High School and, after a brief stint…

Nella Larsen was born on April 13, 1891, in Chicago, Illinois, to a Danish mother and a father from the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) who died or disappeared when she was young. Her mother subsequently married a Danish man, and Nella grew up as the racially mixed child in an otherwise…