WLaura Adams Armer was an American artist and writer. In 1932, her novel Waterless Mountain won the Newbery Medal. She was also an early photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
WMaximilian Adalbert Baer Jr. is an American actor, producer, comedian, and director. He is best known for playing Jethro Bodine, the dim-witted nephew of Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies.
WAdrienne Jo Barbeau is an American actress, singer and the author of three books. Barbeau came to prominence in the 1970s as Broadway's original Rizzo in the musical Grease, and as Carol Traynor, the divorced daughter of Maude Findlay on the sitcom Maude (1972–1978). In 1980 she began appearing in horror and science fiction films, including The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), Creepshow (1982), and Swamp Thing (1982). Other films included: Back to School (1986) and Argo (2012). During the 1990s, she became known for providing the voice of Catwoman on Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995), and subsequent Batman cartoon series. In the 2000s, she appeared on the HBO series Carnivàle as Ruthie the snake dancer.
WDustin Lance Black is an American screenwriter, director, film and television producer, and LGBT rights activist. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the biopic Milk (2008).
WDeborah Blum is an American journalist and the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is author of books including The Poisoner's Handbook (2010) and The Poison Squad (2018), and has been a columnist for The New York Times and a blogger for Wired.
WHerbert Eugene Caen was a San Francisco humorist and journalist whose daily column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, painful puns, and offbeat anecdotes—"a continuous love letter to San Francisco"—appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for almost sixty years and made him a household name throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
WStanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
WAimée Isabella Crocker was an American princess, mystic, Bohemian, and author. She was known for her cultural exploration of the Far East, for her extravagant parties in San Francisco, New York and Paris, and for her collections of husbands and lovers, adopted children, Buddhas, pearls, tattoos and snakes.
WJoan Didion is an American writer who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Didion's writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.
WGreta Celeste Gerwig is an American actress and filmmaker. She first garnered attention after working on and appearing in several mumblecore films. Between 2006 and 2009, she appeared in a number of films by Joe Swanberg, some of which she co-wrote or co-directed, including Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008).
WGregory P. Hawkins is an American speaker, writer, teacher, lawyer and former elected official.
WRyan Holiday is an American marketer and author. He is the former director of marketing for American Apparel and a media columnist and editor-at-large for the New York Observer.
WKimberly Nicole Rathkamp, known professionally as Kayden Kross, is an American pornographic actress, writer, and director.
WLisa J. Ling is an American journalist, television personality, and author. She is currently the host of This Is Life with Lisa Ling on CNN. Previously, she was a reporter on Channel One News, a co-host on the ABC daytime talk show The View (1999–2002), the host of National Geographic Explorer (2003–2010), and a special correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show. Ling later hosted Our America with Lisa Ling on OWN from 2011 to 2014.
WJoan Lunden is an American journalist, an author, and a television host. Lunden was the co-host of ABC's Good Morning America from 1980 to 1997, and has authored eight books. She has appeared on the Biography program and Biography Channel.
WPatrick Macias is an American author and co-author of several titles on pop culture fandom, specifically relating to Japanese culture and otaku culture in America. Macias is also a correspondent for NHK World Television show Tokyo Eye, and is the head editor of the otaku culture magazine titled Otaku USA, which debuted on June 5, 2007. In 2014, Patrick became the Senior Manager of New Initiatives at Crunchyroll.
WGeorge Edmond Manley is an American voice actor, novelist and screenplay writer. He attended San Jose State University, majoring in theatre arts, University of Nevada, Reno, majoring in journalism and holds his associate of science degree in Computer Information Systems and trained at San Francisco's Voice One Studio and with Braintracks Audio's Nancy Wolfson in commercial and character voiceover.
WKarl W. Palachuk is a public speaker and an author, widely recognized as one of the pioneers of managed services. Palachuk has trained technology consultants and business owners all over the world. He’s the author of fifteen books, including several of the best-selling books on Amazon for the topic “managed services.”
WRichard Rodriguez is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a narrative about his intellectual development.
WAnthony Sadler Jr. is an American author and television personality. Sadler, along with his friends Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone and several other passengers stopped a gunman on a Paris-bound train travelling from Amsterdam via Brussels in August 2015, gaining international recognition for their role in the event. Recognized by then-U.S. President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande, Sadler received several awards and decorations for his actions. He, along with his friends, was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French president which is the highest French order for military and civil merits. After the event, Sadler made several television appearances, including a guest appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and honored with the 2016 Spike Guys Choice Award on Spike TV, among other appearances. He, Skarlatos and Stone co-authored a memoir, titled The 15:17 to Paris, published in August 2016, which detailed the events leading up to the attack, which occurred a year prior to the release of the book. Clint Eastwood directed a biographical film with the same title based on Sadler, Skarlatos and Stone's memoir, starring them, along with actresses Jenna Fischer and Judy Greer. The film was released in early 2018 by Warner Bros. Pictures. Sadler graduated from California State University, Sacramento in 2017.
WCasey Konstantin Serin is an Uzbekistan-born American blogger and a former real estate investor. In a newspaper article, USA Today called him the "poster child for everything that went wrong in the real estate boom". Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Serin immigrated to the United States in 1994. After graduating from high school, Serin bounced from job to job, generally working in website design. However, in his early twenties, Serin decided to quit working full-time in order to pursue a career in house flipping as a means of earning an income and building wealth. In an eight-month period beginning in October 2005, Serin purchased eight houses in four southwest U.S. states, and then began blogging about the foreclosure process on the properties he was unable to resell. In time, five of the eight properties foreclosed. The dubious nature of Serin's real estate transactions, coupled with his subsequent blogging about the affair, have led to Serin's name becoming strongly associated with the subprime mortgage crisis.
WNicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter, and philanthropist. He has published twenty one novels and two non-fiction books, all of which have been New York Times bestsellers, with over 115 million copies sold worldwide in more than 50 languages.
WLincoln Austin Steffens was an American investigative journalist and one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. He launched a series of articles in McClure's, called Tweed Days in St. Louis, that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities. He is remembered for investigating corruption in municipal government in American cities and for his leftist values.
WDeon Taylor is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is the founder of Hidden Empire Film Group.
WWilliam Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Europe Central.
WCornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, author, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." A radical democrat and socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004).