Author Bios

Ursula K. Le Guin was born on October 21, 1929, in Berkeley, California, to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, whose book Ishi in Two Worlds became a classic of American anthropological writing. This upbringing — in a household where the study of human cultures, languages, and mythologies was daily life —…

Kayleb Rae Candrilli is a poet born in rural Pennsylvania who grew up in a working-class household shaped by the economic precarity of the American interior and the particular weight of queer identity in a conservative environment. They completed their MFA at the University of Tennessee and have since established themselves as one of the…

Rachel McKibbens is a poet, playwright, and activist born in 1974, of Latina heritage, who grew up in California in circumstances marked by poverty, family violence, and the particular hardships of a childhood shaped by addiction and abuse. She has written and spoken extensively about her own history — including her mother’s mental illness, her…

Chen Chen was born in 1989 in Xiamen, China, and immigrated to the United States as a child, growing up in Massachusetts. He completed his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University, and is currently a Kundiman fellow and assistant professor of English at Rice University. He is openly gay, and his…

Ada Limon was born in 1976 in Sonoma, California, and grew up between Sonoma and New York. She attended the University of Washington before completing her MFA at New York University. Of Mexican and American heritage, she spent years working in the New York literary world before moving to Lexington, Kentucky, a move she has…

T.S. Eliot was born Thomas Stearns Eliot on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a distinguished New England family with deep roots in Unitarian culture and civic life. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford, where he read philosophy and came under the influence of Bertrand Russell and the idealist…

Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in Odessa, in what was then the Soviet Union, into a Jewish family. He lost most of his hearing at age four after an undiagnosed ear infection, a fact that becomes deeply resonant given that his most celebrated work is a book about a town of the deaf. He…

Stephenie Meyer was born on December 24, 1973, in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. She was the second of six children in a Mormon family, an upbringing whose values around love, commitment, and the tension between desire and restraint would deeply colour her fiction. She attended Brigham Young University on a National…

James Dashner was born on November 26, 1972, in Austell, Georgia, and grew up in the town of Duluth in the greater Atlanta area. He demonstrated an early passion for science fiction and fantasy that explored grand-scale adventure and the resilience of young protagonists. He attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he studied…

Lois Lowry was born on March 20, 1937, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father was an Army dentist, and like many military children she grew up moving between postings in Pennsylvania, New York, and Japan. This childhood of displacement and adaptation gave her an early sensitivity to difference, belonging, and the ways in which societies construct…