Each month, we highlight birthdays of authors for you to discover through print and digital items as well as online biographies. In the post below, click on the author’s name to find titles by them in our catalog. Read a bit about each author below and find their full biography in the database listed.
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Azar Nafisi: “Nafisi was fired from the University of Tehran, where she taught literature, because she refused to wear a veil. From 1995 to 1997 she set up weekly secret meetings with seven female students to discuss literature. Reading "Lolita" in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is the story of Nafisi, her students, and the books that they discussed during those meetings. The book has been translated into more than ten languages and is in its fifteenth printing.” From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Ann Patchett: “Ann Patchett is the author of such award-winning novels The Patron Saint of Liars and Bel Canto. Patchett's power as an author seems to derive from her unusual ability to make believable the voices of a sweeping array of characters, running the gamut from a Catholic nun to an African-American blues drummer to a gay magician.” From Authors and Artists for Young Adults in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Joan Didion: “Joan Didion uses her immediate milieu to envision, simultaneously, the last stand of America's frontier values pushed insupportably to their limits and the manifestations of craziness and malaise which have initiated their finale. And while her novels invite a feminist critique, her understanding of sexual politics is beyond ideology. Each of her major characters struggles with a demonic nihilism which is corroding the individual, the family, and the social organism.” From Contemporary Novelists in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Jason Reynolds: “Jason Reynolds is a poet and novelist whose infectious enthusiasm for the written and spoken word--and for the young readers for whom he writes--has made him an award-winning author and an in-demand speaker across the United States. Kayla Randall, writing for the Washington City Paper, described Reynolds as ‘all tattoos and dreads in a black t-shirt,’ adding, ‘He speaks his truth and maybe yours, too.’ Reynolds, who admitted that he had never read an entire book from start to finish until he was nearly 18, writes for children who usually do not always see their own lives reflected in the books they are given to read.” From Contemporary Black Biography in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Jason Reynolds was also the 2021 recipient of the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature, which gives formal recognition, on behalf of the Tulsa County community, to a nationally acclaimed author who has made a significant contribution to the field of literature for young adults. Learn more about this year’s award winner, Nikki Grimes, and her event with us on Friday, May 6, 2022, here.
Pearl Cleage: “Pearl Cleage is a multifaceted writer of essays, short stories, and poems, as well as a performance artist and the author of award-winning plays. In her collection of essays Deals with the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot (1993), she describes herself as a ‘womanist’ and a ‘third generation black nationalist.’ The purpose of her writing, she says, is often ‘to expose the point where racism and sexism meet.’” From Notable Black American Women in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Clarice Lispector: “Clarice Lispector, one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century. … Lispector composed her modernist narratives, which often examine the link between literature and philosophy, in a stream-of-consciousness, interior-monologue style. Acknowledged as one of the premiere writers of experimental fiction in the 1960s, Lispector wrote poetic prose obsessively concerned with capturing the perfectly nuanced word and with expanding the possibilities and range of language, often through paradox.” From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Helen Oyeyemi: “Helen Oyeyemi is a Nigerian-born British writer who burst onto the international literary scene at age 19 with the publication of her debut novel, The Icarus Girl, in 2005. Since then Oyeyemi has published four more novels and a collection of short stories, establishing herself as a major young talent in contemporary fiction. Distinguished by the author's lyrical prose and elements of magical realism, Oyeyemi's work explores themes of identity, alienation, and madness through the lens of the African diasporic experience.” From Contemporary Black Biography in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Emily Dickinson: “’If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?’ A rhetorical question, for Emily Dickinson, the lyric poet sometimes known as the New England mystic, knew there was no other way. She spent her life creating an opus of 1,775 poems, only ten of which were published in her lifetime. She knew what made poetry, otherwise she could never have kept writing in the face of such public indifference.” From Authors and Artists for Young Adults in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Naguib Mahfouz: “Naguib Mahfouz is widely regarded as Egypt's finest writer. While his works remained largely unknown in English-speaking countries for most of the twentieth century, the author has nevertheless been viewed by many critics outside the Middle East as the exemplar of Arabic literature. Mahfouz was suddenly cast into the limelight in the West on October 13, 1988, when he became the first Arab writer to be honored with the Nobel Prize for literature.” From Authors and Artists for Young Adults in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Shirley Jackson: "Despite a long writing career that included best-selling novels, plays, children's books, and humorous sketches, Shirley Jackson was best known to most readers as the author of 'The Lottery,' a chilling short story about ritual sacrifice in a small village. After the story's publication in the New Yorker, many critics began hailing Jackson as a master of the gothic horror tale (while many angry readers demanded to know what the story really meant). Jackson's willingness to disturb, disrupt, and sometimes anger her audience was not confined to her short tales; in novels such as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, she repeatedly explored the darker facets of human nature and modern society. No matter how grim her theme, however, Jackson never forgot what she considered a writer's primary task: to tell a good story." From Authors and Artists for Young Adults in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Jane Austen: “Austen's fiction dwells exclusively on social relations among the landed gentry and rural professionals of her own social class. Her wry depictions of gentlemen and gentlewomen in pursuit of fortune, romance, and love were popular in her day, and continue to be widely read and enjoyed. … In her attention to the details of daily life, Austen's affection for the society she represented is obvious. As an artist, however, her attitude toward that society was ultimately ironic and critical.” From Authors and Artists for Young Adults in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Sandra Cisneros: “As the first Hispanic-American to receive a major publishing contract, Sandra Cisneros has provided a voice for she who had had none before, the Hispanic-American woman--or to use Cisneros' favored word--the chicana. ‘I'm trying to write the stories that haven't been written. I feel like a cartographer. I'm determined to fill a literary void,’ Cisneros told Jim Sagel of Publishers Weekly. In doing so, she speaks out against racism, sexism, poverty, and shame.” From Contemporary Hispanic Biography in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Nalo Hopkinson: "Nalo Hopkinson is an award-winning science fiction writer whose work blends African, Caribbean, and Creole folklore with the conventions of the science fiction and fantasy genre. Critics have responded favorably to her work, especially for its touches of magic realism and underlying themes of race and gender. Hopkinson's debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, which won the Warner Aspect First Novel contest and a major publishing deal, introduces readers to a milieu consisting of a dystopian science fiction setting interwoven with Afro-Caribbean folklore and the patois dialect that has since come to be associated with many of her works." From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
Tomas Rivera: “Tomás Rivera overcame extreme obstacles to become a prominent academic. The son of migrant agricultural laborers, Rivera was subjected to an interrupted and dislocated early education. Nevertheless, Rivera became a highly respected scholar and university administrator. He also acquired an impressive readership for his creative stories and character sketches. As the first Mexican American to serve as chancellor in the University of California system, Rivera set a high standard for academic professionalism and personal achievement.” From Dictionary of Hispanic Biography in the Biography in Context database, accessible here. Just login with your last name and TCCL card number.
