Billy Collins

United States Poet Laureate (2001–2003)

Billy Collins (US Poet Laureate 2001-2003) is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note, but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. The accessibility of his work offers students an appealing entry into the study and appreciation of poetry. According to Billy Collins, poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race.

Suggested Title: The Trouble with Poetry

Firoozeh Dumas

Bestselling Author of Funny in Farsi:
A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America

Firoozeh Dumas is the bestselling author of Funny in Farsi, her smart and funny memoir of growing up in Iran and California. Jimmy Carter called Funny in Farsi “a humorous and introspective chronicle of a life filled with love—of family, country and heritage.” Funny in Farsi is now on the California Recommended Reading List and is used in many junior high, high schools, and universities across the country. Firoozeh Dumas’ most recent memoir is entitled Laughing Without an Accent (May 2008).

Suggested Titles: Funny in Farsi, Laughing Without an Accent

Anne Fadiman

Award-winning Author, Essayist, and Editor

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman chronicles the trials of an epileptic Hmong child and her family living in Merced, California. Fadiman’s sensitive, incisive treatment of the unbreachable gulf between the Hmong and American medical systems won her a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. In her talks, Anne Fadiman deals with the cross-cultural challenge she faced, and she discusses the lessons she learned about how American health care providers can provide more sensitive and effective care for patients from other cultures.

Suggested Title: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Alexandra Fuller

Award-winning Author, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight:
An African Childhood

Alexandra Fuller is the author of the national bestseller Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Booksense Nonfiction Pick of the Year. Her most recent work, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant (May 2008), recounts the life (and death) of a young roughneck in Wyoming. Fuller has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers including The New Yorker and National Geographic.

Suggested Title: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Elizabeth Kolbert

Journalist and Author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe:
Man, Nature and Climate Change

Growing out of a ground-breaking three-part series in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done, and how we can save our planet. With interviews from researchers and environmentalists, Kolbert explains the science and the studies, and unpacks the politics, offering a clear, succinct, and invaluable report from the front.

Suggested Title: Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

Anchee Min

Bestselling Memoirist, Novelist, and Author of Red Azalea

Anchee Min’s writing has been praised for its raw, sharp language and historical accuracy. Her bestselling memoir Red Azalea, which recounts her childhood in communist China, has been compared to The Diary of Anne Frank. Min credits the English language with giving her a means to express herself, arming her with the voice and vocabulary to write about growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution. “There was no way for me to describe those experiences or talk about those feelings in Chinese,” she has said of a language too burdened by Maoist rhetoric.

Suggested Title: Red Azalea

Azar Nafisi

Professor and Bestselling Author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Azar Nafsi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrifed its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. Earning high acclaim and an enthusiastic readership, Reading Lolita in Tehran is an incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny.

Suggested Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Michael Pollan

Award-winning Journalist and Bestselling Writer, Author of An Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto was a New York Times bestseller.  Pollan’s is a crucial voice in the growing discussion about our current way of eating.  He is also a narrator of the feature documentary film Food, Inc., which highlights the increase of genetically-modified foods and unsavory practices in the modern food industry.

Suggested Title: In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma

Mark Salzman

Acclaimed Author of Iron & Silk, Lying Awake, and True Notebooks

Mark Salzman’s experiences in China were the inspiration for his first book, Iron & Silk. His great sense of humor—so integral to his marvelous ability to tell a story— is a highlight of his public appearances. Mark Salzman’s book True Notebooks is a fascinating look at his experiences as a writing teacher at Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for violent teenage offenders. Common to each of his works is the theme of how people struggle to reach an ideal but often fall short.

Suggested Titles: Iron & Silk and True Notebooks

Dr. Robert Sapolsky

Science and Nature Writer, Biologist, Neuroscientist,
and Stress Expert

Stress expert and researcher Dr. Robert Sapolsky is the author of several books, including A Primate’s Memoir. He investigates the body’s response to stress, combining insights from the field and the lab; Sapolsky reveals how relationships between physiology, personality, and stress affect our health and our ability to meet personal and professional challenges. He has the rare gift of being able, as Dr. Oliver Sacks puts it, “to deal with the weightiest topics both authoritatively and wittily, with so light a touch they become accessible to all.”

Suggested Titles: A Primate’s Memoir and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Marjane Satrapi

Best-selling Artist/Illustrator of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Persepolis tells the story of Satrapi’s youth in Iran in the 1970s and 80s, and of living through the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq. It is a book about childhood, beset by the unthinkable, but buffered by an extraordinary and loving family. Persepolis has been lauded with comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and won several prestigious comic book awards. The feature film of Persepolis has been released in the US to great acclaim.

Suggested Title: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Eric Schlosser

Bestselling Author and Journalist, Author of Fast Food Nation and Chew on This

Eric Schlosser’s first book Fast Food Nation helped start a revolution in how Americans think about what they eat. With a background as an investigative reporter, Schlosser offers an incisive history of the development of American fast food and indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy.

Art Spiegelman

Pulitzer Prize-winning Artist/Illustrator, Author of MAUS and MAUS II

Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative MAUS. His work MAUS II continues the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity, and controversial content. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for “comics echo the way the brain works.”

Suggested Titles: MAUS I & II

Terry Tempest Williams

Conservationist, Advocate for Free Speech, and Author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Terry Tempest Williams is perhaps best known for her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, in which she chronicles the epic rise of the Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1983, alongside her mother’s diagnosis with ovarian cancer. This work is now regarded as a classic in American nature writing. Terry Tempest Williams believes landscape shapes culture. A passionate advocate for public lands and a fierce voice for freedom of speech, Williams was named by Utne Reader as one of its “Utne 100 Visionaries.”

Suggested Title: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place