WDaniel Alarcón is a novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Journalism School and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.
WMaryon Pittman Allen was an American journalist who served as United States Senator from Alabama for five months in 1978, after her husband, Senator James B. Allen, died in office.
WLou Anders is the author of the Thrones & Bones series of middle grade fantasy novels. Anders is a Hugo Award-winning American editor, a Chesley Award-winning art director, an author and a journalist.
WJudith Mary Baragwanath is a New Zealand writer, satirist, fashion critic, fashion muse, model, socialite and maître d’ also known as "Old Black Lips." She rose to prominence in the 1960s as a New Zealand model after appearing in NZ Vogue magazine at the age of 15. She is well-known for her magazine column and feature writing, including contributions (1982–2002) to "Felicity Ferret", a gossip column published in Auckland magazine Metro. New Zealand journalist and writer Steve Braunias has called her "just about, if not the most, concise writer being regularly published that this country has ever seen. One of the most vivid writers we've ever had in non-fiction."
WJerry Harrell Bentley was an American academic and professor of world history. He was a founding editor of the Journal of World History since 1990. He wrote on the cultural history of early modern Europe and on cross-cultural interactions in world history. He was one of the cited experts in Annenberg Media's 2004 series of educational videos that are broadcast by satellite on the Annenberg Channel.
WHenrietta Boggs was an American author, journalist, and activist. She served as First Lady of Costa Rica from 1948 to 1949 in the years immediately following the Costa Rican Civil War. She turned 100 in May 2018.
WRobert Cleckler "Bobby" Bowden is a retired American football coach. Bowden is best known for coaching the Florida State Seminoles football team from 1976 to 2009, and is considered one of the greatest college football coaches of all time for his accomplishments with the Seminoles.
WSuzanne Collins is an American television writer and author. She is known as the author of The New York Times best-selling series The Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games.
WGeorge Marcus Cruikshank was an American educator, newspaper editor, and historian active mostly in Birmingham, Alabama. He had political appointments on staff at Congress and as US Postmaster of Birmingham.
WAngela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ideologically a Marxist, Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She is the author of over ten books on class, feminism, race, and the US prison system.
WRachel Held Evans was an American Christian columnist, blogger and author. Her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood was a New York Times bestseller in e-book non-fiction, and Searching for Sunday was a New York Times bestseller nonfiction paperback.
WPaul Finebaum is an American sports author, television and radio personality, and former columnist. His primary focus is sports, particularly those in the Southeast. After many years as a reporter, columnist, and sports-talk radio host in the Birmingham area, Finebaum was hired by ESPN in 2013 for its new SEC Network starting in 2014, and produces a radio show out of the network's regional base in Charlotte, North Carolina.
WArthur Ernest "Ernie" Fitzgerald was an American engineer, a member of the Senior Executive Service in the United States Air Force, and a prominent U.S. government whistleblower.
WFannie Flagg is an American actress, comedian and author. She is best known as a semi-regular panelist on the 1973–82 versions of the game show Match Game and for the 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which was adapted into the 1991 motion picture Fried Green Tomatoes. She was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay adaptation. Flagg lives in California and Alabama.
WJames Stillman Free was an American journalist whose 50 years of Washington-based reporting included coverage of 10 presidential administrations, seven national political conventions, the Cold War, labor relations, civil rights, and the space program.
WCharles Latham Gaines, Jr. is an American writer and outdoorsman, notable for numerous works in both the fiction and non-fiction genres. His writing most typically concerns the outdoors sports of fishing in general and fly fishing in particular, as well as upland bird hunting and mountaineering, often with an intellectual and philosophical bent, and an eye towards the various cultures and traditions surrounding different forms of fishing around the world.
WCharles Ghigna, known also as Father Goose is an American poet and author of children's and adults' books. He has written more than 5,000 poems and 100 books.
WGail Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer. Godwin has written 14 novels, two short story collections, three non-fiction books, and ten libretti. Her primary literary accomplishments are her novels, which have included five best-sellers and three finalists for the National Book Award. Most of her books are realistic fiction novels that follow a character's psychological and intellectual development, often based on themes taken from Godwin's own life.
WJohn Michael Green is an American author and YouTube content creator. He won the 2006 Printz Award for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, and his fourth solo novel, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in January 2012. The 2014 film adaptation opened at number one at the box office. In 2014, Green was included in Time magazine's list of The 100 Most Influential People in the World. Another film based on a Green novel, Paper Towns, was released on July 24, 2015.
WMorgan Murphy is an American Southern food critic, humorist, journalist, and Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy Reserve.
WWalker Percy, Obl.S.B. was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; the first, The Moviegoer, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
WImani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
WCondoleezza "Condi" Rice is an American diplomat, political scientist, civil servant, and professor who is the current Director of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Rice served as the 66th United States Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and as the 20th United States National Security Advisor from 2001 to 2005. A member of the Republican Party, Rice was the first female African-American Secretary of State and the first woman to serve as National Security Advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president and 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch.
WMark Eugene Russinovich is a Spanish-born American software engineer who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2006.
WSonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has authored over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin.
WTeresa (Katz) Thorne was born April 17, 1954 in Montgomery, Alabama. Her father was a WWII veteran, a former engineer with the Department of the Navy, and an executive with a dry goods/clothing outlet. Her mother was the State Legislative Chairperson for the League of Women Voters and an active reformer of the Alabama State Legislature. Thorne's youth was spent in a climate of civil unrest, as Montgomery was a hotbed for the American Civil Rights Movement. She attended the University of Alabama and obtained a Masters in Social Work before being hired as the first Jewish female officer for the Birmingham Police Department in Alabama, eventually promoted to captain.
WIrita Bradford Van Doren was an American literary figure and editor of the New York Herald Tribune book review for 37 years.
WMargaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.
WDaniel Wallace is an American author. He is best known for his 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions. His other books include Ray in Reverse and The Watermelon King. His stories have also been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.
WJohn Weld was an American newspaper reporter and writer.
WEdward Osborne Wilson, usually cited as E. O. Wilson, is an American biologist, naturalist, and writer. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he has been called the world's leading expert.
WTobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has written four short story collections and two novels including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015.
WMargaret Wrinkle is an American writer and documentary film maker. She is known for her 2013 novel, Wash, which was a fiction runner-up for the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and for co-creating the 1996 documentary broken/ground.