Hello, Good Readers! My new novel SAM is about a young girl's exuberance, wonder, and ambition as she comes of age. Jenna Bush Hager picked SAM for her Today Show book club and said, "Sam is about as perfect of a coming-of-age story as I have ever read." About me: I was born in Brooklyn, but I grew up in Honolulu. I now live in Cambridge, MA and I own boots. In addition to writing fiction, I read a lot and teach on occasion. In my free time, I swim and walk around the city. I have four children, now getting pretty grown up. My oldest son (an economist) reads everything. My second son (a law student and grad student in political theory) reads mostly non-fiction, although I try to get him to read novels. My third son (a college student) loves science fiction, fantasy, and history. My daughter (a college student and aspiring human centered designer) enjoys biography and novels—but only if they have exceptionally beautiful covers! I read fiction, biography, history, poetry, and books about art. I also enjoy discovering new authors in translation. When I was a seven-year-old living in Hawaii, I decided to become a novelist—but I began by writing poetry and short stories. In high school and college I focused on short stories, and in June, 1986, I published my first in "Commentary." My first book was a collection of short stories, "Total Immersion." My second book, "The Family Markowitz" is a short story cycle that people tend to read as a novel. Much of my work is about family in its many forms. I am also interested in religion, science, the threats and opportunities of technology, and the exploration of islands, real, and imaginary. My novel, "Kaaterskill Falls" travels with a group of observant Jews to the Catskill Mountains. "Intuition" enters a research a lab, where a young post-doc makes a discovery that excites everybody except for one skeptic—his ex-girlfriend. A rare collection of cookbooks stars in my novel, "The Cookbook Collector." A girl named Honor tries to save her mother in my dystopian YA novel, "The Other Side of the Island." With Michael Prince, I have co-authored a supercool writing textbook! If you teach composition, take a look at "Speaking of Writing: a Brief Rhetoric." If you'd like to learn more about me and about each of my books, check out my website: http://allegragoodman.com/ Find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AllegraGoodman Or on Instagram: @allegragoodmanwriter And of course, you can check out the reviews I post here on Goodreads!

Kent Haruf was born in eastern Colorado. He received his Bachelors of Arts in literature from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973. For two years, he taught English in Turkey with the Peace Corps and his other jobs have included a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Colorado, a hospital in Arizona, a library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, and universities in Nebraska and Illinois. Haruf is the author of Plainsong, which received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction, and The New Yorker Book Award. Plainsong was also a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award. His novel, The Tie That Binds, received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the Pen/Hemingway Foundation. In 2006, Haruf was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. All of his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. Holt is loosely based on Yuma, Colorado, an early residence of Haruf in the 1980s. Haruf lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado, with their three daughters. He died of cancer on November 30, 2014.

“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.” – Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway. In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department. He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016. For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen. Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. James Baldwin (1841-1925) was an American editor and author. Largely self-educated, he began teaching at the age of 24. In addition to editing school books, he started writing books of his own. After the publication in 1882 of The Story of Siegfried, he went on to write more than 50 others. At one time it was estimated that of all the school books in use in the United States, over half had been written or edited by him. He is best remembered for the books of introductory historical sketches he wrote for younger students and his retellings of the legends of heroes for older students. Other works include: The Story of Roland (1883), A Story of the Golden Age (1887), Old Greek Stories (1895), Fifty Famous Stories Retold (1896), Four Great Americans (1897), Hero Tales (1904), Fifty Famous People (1912) and In My Youth (1914).