Steve Alten
MEG, a 70,000-pound prehistoric cousin of the Great White Shark, is thriller writer Steve Alten's best-known character. Since the science-fiction series debuted in 1998, the MEG books have become international best-sellers and have even been transformed into a popular radio series in Japan. The latest, MEG: Hell's Aquarium, continues the adventures of Jonas Taylor, a paleontologist who studies the giant beast. After MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror was named the No. 1 book for reluctant readers, Alten created Adopt-an-Author, a nationwide non-profit program that encourages teens to read. He has also written five other novels, including The Shell Game, a cautionary tale of the end of oil and the next 9/11 event.
www.SteveAlten.com

Russell Banks
Literary giant Russell Banks has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. His books, often gritty analyses of small-town life, have been translated into 20 languages. His newest work, The Reserve, set in the Adirondacks in the late 1930s, is part love story and part murder mystery, and explores issues of class, politics, art, love and madness. Banks is the founder of the Cities of Refuge North America, which helps provide persecuted international writers with safe havens in North America. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His major works include Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels have been made into movies.

R. B. Bernstein
R.B. Bernstein has turned his historian's eye and graceful style to The Founding Fathers Reconsidered. Google Books says it is "a concise, scholarly, yet accessible overview of the brilliant, flawed and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as 'the Founding Fathers.'" Bernstein is a Harvard Law School graduate who holds a Ph.D. in history from New York University. A prolific writer, he is a distinguished adjunct professor of law at New York University. The New York Times called Bernstein's 2003 biography, Thomas Jefferson, "the best short biography of Jefferson ever written."

Bob Morris
An inveterate traveler and former newspaper columnist, Bob Morris has been writing his Caribbean-based mystery series, featuring Zack Chasteen, since 2005. His debut, Bahamarama, was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery Novel and chosen by Library Journal as one of the year's Top Five Mysteries. In 2009, he released the fifth book in the series, Baja Florida, which takes Zack on a mission from one end of the Bahamas to the other. Morris, a fourth-generation Floridian, is teaching a course in writing crime fiction this semester at Rollins College in Winter Park.
www.bobmorris.net

Deborah Crombie
Deborah Crombie, a Macavity Award winner and Edgar Award nominee, is well known by mystery fans throughout the world for her series of 13 detective novels set in England. A Texan, she lived for a number of years in England and Scotland and returns to the UK several times a year to research her books. In her latest novel, Necessary As Blood, a disappearance, a murder, and a child in danger lead Scotland Yard detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid into London's legendary East End - a neighborhood where the rich and the poor, the ambitious and the dangerous, collide - to solve one of the most challenging and disturbing cases they've ever faced.
www.deborahcrombie.com

Patricia Powell
Patricia Powell is recognized as a major voice in Caribbean literature. Her new novel, The Fullness of Everything, follows a Jamaican man reluctantly returning home after being informed of his father's imminent death and having avoided contact with his family for 25 years. "With her flawless ear for the poetic vernacular of her native Jamaica and her in-depth understanding of the complexity of island society, Powell continues to affirm the Caribbean's rightful place on the literary map of the world," writes fellow Caribbean author Paule Marshall. Powell has taught creative writing at Harvard, Wellesley College and MIT. She has been the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers' Award.

Joy Fielding
Canadian writer Joy Fielding is the best-selling author of 18 psychological novels, including Still Life, Charley's Web, Heartstopper and See Jane Run. Before embarking on the writing life, she enjoyed a brief acting career under the name Joy Tepperman, appearing in the student film Winter Kept Us Warm (1965) and the TV show Gunsmoke, and even got to kiss Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. Her new book, The Wild Zone, is set in a South Beach bar, where a seemingly casual bet among friends goes terrifyingly awry. Fielding is often praised for her "heart-pounding" (Booklist) brand of storytelling, full of "chillingly satisfying twists" (People).
www.joyfielding.com

Mireille Guiliano
Mireille Guiliano's first book, French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure, became a runaway best seller around the globe in 2005. Her latest book, Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire: Business Sense & Sensibility, is an insightful guide to navigating the working world, living the good life and savoring every minute of it. For more than 20 years, she was the spokesperson for Champagne Veuve Clicquot and CEO of Clicquot, Inc., overseeing a remarkable pattern of double-digit growth in the United States year after year. A member of the Council of 200, which is made up of the world's most successful women entrepreneurs and corporate leaders, she works with groups promoting business opportunities and education for women.
www.mireilleguiliano.com

Anne C. Heller
Personal-finance author Suze Orman can take credit for introducing Anne C. Heller to the writings of controversial author Ayn Rand. Orman mailed Heller, who was then editing a new financial magazine at Conde Nast Publications, a copy of Rand's famous "money speech" in Atlas Shrugged that declares money is "the root of all good." Intrigued, Heller read all of Rand's works and eventually wrote Ayn Rand and the World She Made, in which she traces Rand's life from her childhood in Russia to her years as a screenwriter, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s. Heller is the former managing editor of The Antioch Review and a fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook.

Jerald Walker
Jerald Walker, author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, was born in a Chicago housing project and raised, along with his six siblings, by blind parents of modest means. Seen as a boy of great promise by parents and teachers, he found himself drawn to the streets, and by age seventeen was a school dropout, a drug addict, and a gang member. Walker, now an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, unflinchingly tells his story, revealing the journey he took to become the man he is today. "This is a subtle piece of work... a pleasure," says Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson.

David Kirby
In his poem The House of Blue Light, noted poet and professor David Kirby says that when he hears America singing, it "sounds like Little Richard." Kirby writes of the hard-partying innovative showman and his huge 1955 hit Tutti Frutti in his book-length essay, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll. Both the pompadoured singer and his high-octane music set the stage for Elvis Presley and all who came after, says Kirby, a distinguished professor of English at Florida State University for 40 years. His poetry has won such distinguished awards as the James Dickey Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Kirby is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
www.davidkirby.com

Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jean Hanff Korelitz's latest novel, Admission, draws on her experience as an "outside reader" in the admissions office at Princeton University. Outside readers, at Princeton and elsewhere, are trained to read applications and provide evaluations of credentials, essays and recommendations. Admission unravels the personal traumas that have kept the life of a young admissions officer on hold while shedding light on the mysterious process of getting into an elite school. Korelitz, a Dartmouth College graduate, has written three other novels, a volume of poetry and a children's book. She has contributed articles and essays to magazines, including Vogue, Real Simple and Newsweek.
www.jeanhanffkorelitz.com

Elizabeth Kostova
Within two weeks of its publication in January, Elizabeth Kostova's Swan Thieves earned a place on The New York Times Best Sellers list. Ranging from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love, Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope. Kostova is the author of the 2005 international bestseller The Historian, an historical mystery involving the legend of Dracula. She is the co-founder of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which helps support creative writing in Bulgaria. Kostova earned her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress.

Emily Liebert
These days, more than 250 million people and organizations around the world have a Facebook profile. In her debut book, Facebook Fairytales: Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit, Emily Liebert shares 25 inspiring stories that have resulted from Facebook connections. These stories emphasize personal struggles and triumphs, including finding biological parents, relaying messages to loved ones during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and hunting down a hit-and-run criminal. Liebert is an award-winning writer for publications including The Robb Report and Cottages & Gardens, and has interviewed celebrities from Hillary Clinton to Chevy Chase.
www.emilyliebert.com

Peter Maass
In Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, veteran international correspondent Peter Maass explores the troubled world oil has created - from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela and beyond. The book features warlords in the oil-rich Niger Delta, petro-billionaires in Moscow, and Americans in Baghdad. Actor Robert Redford calls this book "essential reading for these times." Maass has worked for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post. His first book, Love They Neighbor: A Story of War, which chronicled his experiences covering the Bosnian conflict, won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for nonfiction in 1996.
www.petermaass.com

Ellen Lupton
Ellen Lupton, the Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, spends a lot of her time examining the everyday objects around us and how well they work, or don't. In her latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things, co-authored with twin sister Julia, she offers a series of irreverent snapshots about design and everyday life, casting a sharp eye on everything from roller bags, porches and stuffed animals to parenting, piles and potted plants. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and the world, Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal and recognized for her role as an educator, author and curator in the field of design.
www.elupton.com

Achy Obejas
Achy Obejas is a Havana-born author, poet and award-winning journalist. Her latest book, Ruins, focuses on the "Special Period" in Cuba in the 1990s when the Soviet-supported economy collapsed, forcing those who backed the Revolution to confront conflicting pressures to stay or to leave. "Daring, tough, and deeply compassionate, Achy Obejas's Ruins is a breathtaker," says Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz. "Obejas writes like an angel, which is to say: gloriously... one of Cuba's most important writers." A former National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow, she twice won the Lambda Literary Award for her novels. www.achyobejas.net

Alexandra Penney
Author and artist Alexandra Penney lost her life savings in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, and since December 2008 has been writing about her lifestyle changes on her blog on the Daily Beast. The Bag Lady Papers: The Priceless Experience of Losing It All, based on this popular blog, chronicles with humor her struggle to cope and her journey back to sanity, solvency and security. Penney is probably best known for her 1982 classic bestselling guide to the art of lovemaking, How to Make Love to a Man. A former editor at Self magazine, she is credited, along with Evelyn Lauder, as the originator of the pink ribbon as a symbol for breast cancer awareness.

Lisa See
Lisa See, author of the critically-acclaimed 2005 international bestseller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, has always been intrigued by stories that have been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up, whether in the past or the present. See's sixth novel, Shanghai Girls, once again delves into forgotten history. Shanghai Girls is about sisters Pearl and May, who leave Shanghai in 1937 and travel to Los Angeles in arranged marriages. It is a story of immigration, racism, wealth, marriage and the tense and loving relationship of sisters. See, who is one-eighth Chinese, grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by her Chinese-American family. Her first book, On Gold Mountain, a non-fiction family history, was adapted in 2000 for the Los Angeles Opera, with a libretto written by See.
www.lisasee.com

Poppy Tooker
Poppy Tooker brings together her love for good slow food and New Orleans in the Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook. It tells the story of the historic market against the backdrop of New Orleans, weaving in tales of market vendors and more than 125 of their family recipes. After Hurricane Katrina, this culinary activist was recognized by the Times-Picayune newspaper as a "Hero of the Storm" for her work helping to rebuild and restore the city's historic eateries. A TV and radio cooking show host, she has conducted cooking classes and lectured throughout the world. Her famous seafood gumbo proved unbeatable in a "Throwdown" with TV cooking show star Bobby Flay!
www.poppytooker.com

L. Jon Wertheim
L. Jon Wertheim is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, covering tennis, the NBA, sports business, and mixed martial arts. In his latest book, Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played, Wertheim depicts the Federer-Nadal rivalry and their epic battle at Wimbledon in 2008 as not just one of the greatest tennis matches ever played, but as one of the greatest games of all time. The author of five other books, his work has been featured four times in The Best American Sports Writing. His weekly "Tennis Mailbag" on SI.com is considered required reading among tennis aficionados.