WMichelle Black is an American author of historical fiction and historical mystery novels. She is also an attorney, former bookstore owner, and publisher.
WBruce Bennett Gorham Clarke is a former United States Army officer. Clarke is currently president of Bruce Clarke Consultants, Inc., a defense consulting firm. He is widely published on military and national security affairs, including in his book Expendable Warriors (2007) and in a regular column for the Examiner.
WWes Jackson co-founded the Land Institute with Dana Jackson. He is also a member of the World Future Council.
WBenjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow, among other honors. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", the first American to receive the honor. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
WKatrina Elizabeth Leskanich is an American musician and the former lead singer of British-American pop rock band Katrina and the Waves. Their song "Walking on Sunshine" was an international hit in 1985. In 1997 the band won the Eurovision Song Contest for the United Kingdom with the song "Love Shine a Light".
WKerry Allen Livgren is an American musician and songwriter, best known as one of the founding members and primary songwriters for the 1970s progressive rock band Kansas.
WSabina Magliocco, is a professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of British Columbia and formerly at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She is an author of non-fiction books and journal articles about folklore, religion, religious festivals, foodways, witchcraft and Neo-Paganism in Europe and the United States.
WNathan "Nate" Phelps is a Canadian-American author, LGBT rights activist, and public speaker on the topics of religion and child abuse. He is the sixth-born of the 13 children of Fred Phelps, from whom he – along with three of his siblings – had been estranged since his 18th birthday in 1976 until his father's death in 2014. Phelps permanently left Westboro Baptist Church in 1980 and has since publicly censured the group.
WSamuel J. Reader (1836–1914) was an American diarist and artist who wrote about his experiences living in Bleeding Kansas and the American Civil War.
WBrett Alan Riley is an American writer and college professor.
WWilliam Robert Roy, also known as Bill Roy, was a United States Representative from Kansas, a physician, and a columnist for The Topeka Capital-Journal.
WDevin Scillian is an American television journalist, musician and children's author.
WCharles Monroe Sheldon was an American Congregationalist minister and leader of the Social Gospel movement. His novel, In His Steps, introduced the principle of "What Would Jesus Do?" which articulated an approach to Christian theology that became popular at the turn of the 20th century and had a revival almost one hundred years later. The stretch of US-24 on the north side of Topeka, Kansas between US-75 and K-4 is named the "Charles Sheldon Trafficway" in his honour.
WLinda Spalding is a Canadian writer and editor. Born in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Jacob Alan Dickinson and Edith Senner, she lived in Mexico and Hawaii before moving to Toronto, Ontario in 1982.
WRex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels and 39 novellas between 1934 and 1975.
WKevin Young is an American poet and teacher of poetry and the incoming director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young has been a winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues. Young has served as Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, as well as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. In March 2017, Young became poetry editor of The New Yorker.