WAnn Beattie is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form.
WGleb Yevgenyevich Botkin was the son of Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, the court physician who was murdered at Yekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks with Tsar Nicholas II and his family on 17 July 1918.
WEric Byler is an American film director, screenwriter and political activist.
WChen Ming-jer is a Taiwanese business and management academic. He is the Leslie E. Grayson Professor of Business Administration at University of Virginia Darden School of Business.
WRita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.
WDaryl Haney, also known by the pen names Duke Haney and D. R. Haney, is an American actor, screenwriter, novelist, and essayist.
WMelissa Victoria Harris-Perry, formerly known as Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, is an American writer, professor, television host, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Harris-Perry hosted the Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news and opinion television show on MSNBC from 2012 to February 27, 2016.
WHenry Hoke is an American author known for hybrid books. He directs Enter>text, a living literary journal, and his short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Electric Literature, Hobart, The Collagist, Birkensnake, and Joyland.
WFountain Hughes was an American former slave freed in 1865 after the American Civil War. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he worked as a laborer for most of his life, moving in 1881 from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. He was interviewed in June 1949 about his life by the Library of Congress as part of the Federal Writers' Project of former slaves' oral histories. The recorded interview is online through the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library.
WAlbert Reinold Hunt Jr. is an American journalist, formerly a columnist for Bloomberg View, the editorial arm of Bloomberg News. Hunt hosted the Sunday morning talk show Political Capital on Bloomberg Television and was also a weekly panelist on CNN's Capital Gang and Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields.
WFrances Parkinson Keyes was an American author who wrote about her life as the wife of a U.S. Senator and novels set in New England, Louisiana, and Europe. A convert to Roman Catholicism, her later works frequently featured Catholic themes and beliefs. Her last name rhymes with "skies," not "keys."
WMark Lane was an American attorney, New York state legislator, civil rights activist, and Vietnam war-crimes investigator. He is best known as a leading researcher, author, and conspiracy theorist on the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. From his 1966 number-one bestselling critique of the Warren Commission, Rush to Judgment, to Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, published in 2011, Lane wrote at least four major works on the JFK assassination and no fewer than ten books overall.
WWilliam Holmes McGuffey was a college professor and president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks. More than 120 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.
WTrevor Walton Moore is an American comedian, actor, writer, director, producer, and musician. He is known as one of the founding members, alongside Sam Brown and Zach Cregger, of the New York City-based comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know, who had their own sketch comedy series on IFC which ran for five seasons.
WOn October 8, 1852, Maria Perkins, an enslaved woman in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, addressed a letter to her husband, also a slave. In the letter, she writes that their son Albert has been sold to a trader, that she fears that she too might be sold, and that she wants their family reunited. Perkins was literate, uncommon among slaves, and all that is known about her comes from the sole letter.
WEugene Puryear is an American journalist, author, activist, and politician. In 2014, he was a candidate for the at-large seat in the DC Council with the D.C. Statehood Green Party. In the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections, Puryear was the vice presidential nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).
WMary Stuart Harrison Smith was an American author, translator, and women's advocate. Her Virginia Cookery Book (1885) is one of the country's early modern cookbooks. In addition to other original works, she published over fifty translated compositions, primarily from the German to English. She also authored numerous book reviews for various periodicals.
WSteven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. An early pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh is an acclaimed and prolific filmmaker.
WEleanor Ross Taylor was an American poet who published six collections of verse from 1960 to 2009. Her work received little recognition until 1998, but thereafter received several major poetry prizes. Describing her most recent poetry collection, Kevin Prufer writes, "I cannot imagine the serious reader — poet or not — who could leave Captive Voices unmoved by the work of this supremely gifted poet who skips so nimbly around our sadnesses and fears, never directly addressing them, suggesting, instead, their complex resistance to summary."
WJohn Cotten Towler Sr. was an American Democratic politician, lawyer, screenwriter and actor.
WS. S. Van Dine is the pseudonym used by American art critic Willard Huntington Wright when he wrote detective novels. Wright was an important figure in avant-garde cultural circles in pre-World War I New York, and under the pseudonym he created the immensely popular fictional detective Philo Vance, a sleuth and aesthete who first appeared in books in the 1920s, then in movies and on the radio.
WThomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was a leading American historian and Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he received his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of Virginia, gaining a reputation for his doctoral dissertation, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (1910), followed by Virginia Under the Stuarts (1914), and his master work, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (1922).
WHenry Wiencek is an American journalist, historian and editor whose work has encompassed historically significant architecture, the Founding Fathers, various topics relating to slavery, and the Lego company. In 1999, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, a biographical history which chronicles the racially intertwined Hairston clan of the noted Cooleemee Plantation House, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.