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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Claudia Rankine (born Jan. 1, 1963): "Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, editor, and educator. Although she identifies herself foremost as a poet, her work often takes a hybrid form that incorporates poetry, essay, and visual collage. Rankine began publishing her poetry in the 1990s and rose to national prominence with the publication of her fifth volume, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a formally inventive and deeply penetrating examination of how racism persists as one of the most corrosive elements of American society in the 21st century. In 2016 Rankine was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, recognizing individuals of exceptional creativity. In making the award, the MacArthur Foundation described Rankine as describing her as 'a poet illuminating the emotional and psychic tensions that mark the experiences of many living in twenty-first-century America.'" From Gale Contemporary Black Biography in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
André Aciman (born Jan. 2, 1951): "André Aciman's debut novel Call Me By Your Name provoked a minor literary sensation when it was first published in 2007 and elevated the New York City professor's profile when it was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film a decade later. The Egyptian-born essayist and specialist on the works of Marcel Proust was gratified by the reception for his work, which Sunday Times journalist Josh Glancy ventured was 'perhaps the most celebrated love story of the 21st century. It captures the torrid thrill of first love with something approaching perfection: the visceral obsession, the terrifying joy, the way it creeps up on you and consumes you. All of us saw some reflection of ourselves.'" From Newsmakers Online in the Biography in Contest database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
John Hope Franklin (born Jan. 2, 1915): “Historian John Hope Franklin was a prominent scholar of African American history who challenged historiography that minimized the efforts of African Americans and praised slavery and the Confederacy. He was also a civil rights activist.” From his biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Seanan McGuire (born Jan. 5, 1978): When asked about issues of gender in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy community, here's what Seanan had to say about improvements in inclusion: "We're getting better about letting everybody come to the party--really, we are--but we keep forgetting, as a community, that nothing is one and done. I've had people tell me that they felt really threatened by the idea of gender equality, like everything would become about quotas and 'political correctness,' and while I sympathize, because it's scary to have the world change, part of me says 'so what?'" From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Tananarive Due (born Jan. 5, 1966): "Journalist and novelist Tananarive Due set her sights on a writing career at an early age. As a sixth grader watching the landmark television miniseries Roots, Due--the daughter of an attorney and a civil-rights activist--traced her own family's history, calling her work My Own Roots. As a young woman, Due attended a summer program for young writers at Northwestern University and won numerous awards for both writing and oratory." From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (born Jan. 5, 1938): "Novelist, dramatist, essayist, and literary critic Ngugi Wa Thiong'o is perhaps East Africa's most prominent writer. Known to many simply as Ngugi, he has been described by Shatto Arthur Gakwandi in The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa as a 'novelist of the people,' for his works show his concern for the inhabitants of his native country, Kenya, who have been oppressed and exploited by colonialism, Christianity, and in recent years, black politicians and businessmen." From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Zora Neale Hurston (born Jan. 7, 1891): “Novelist, short story writer, playwright, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston is best known for novels and short stories that make use of the vernacular and display a rich, complex sense of rural African American life, particularly in the South. Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is her most prominent work.” From her biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Diana Gabaldon (born Jan. 11, 1952): "Diana Gabaldon is a former biologist and university professor who has become the best-selling writer of the "Outlander" series of historical fantasy novels. In 2014 the series was adapted as a television series for the Starz network. Gabaldon's writing career began with two unlikely endeavors, considering the eventual direction of her career. While she was an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University in the 1980s, she became an expert in the use of software programs for scientific research. This led to her founding the scholarly journal Science Software, which she ran and edited. While this experience gave her a good deal of writing experience, she credits her freelance work writing comics about Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge for Walt Disney Productions from 1979 to 1980 for teaching her 'most of what I know about the mechanics of storytelling,' she states on her Web site." From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Haruki Murakami (born Jan. 12, 1949): "The content of his work is not related to that of traditional Japanese literature and his writing style does not follow after the techniques set down by prior modern writers. Some critics claim Murakami's style can read like translation from English. His unusual style, without traditional roots, has made his work controversial among critics and, simultaneously, popular among younger generations. The reason for his break from traditional Japanese realism can be simply stated: it is not effective anymore, at least for him, to use 'realism' to describe Japan or the world in which we live now. The world is changing rapidly and Japan is not what it used to be. In the 70's and 80's, both underwent drastic changes, especially in the field of technology." From St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Yukio Mishima (born Jan. 14, 1925): "Life magazine once called Yukio Mishima "the Japanese Hemingway," while Japan's first Nobel laureate, Yasunari Kawabata, "declared that a `writer of his caliber appears only once every 200 or 300 years,'" as reported in the Economist. Mishima was a writer, poet, playwright, librettist, actor, bodybuilder, and right-wing political activist renowned for his flamboyant personality, eccentric political beliefs, and spectacular ritual suicide in 1970." From Authors and Artists for Young Adults in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Ernest J. Gaines (born Jan. 15, 1933): “Novelist and short story writer Ernest Gaines is noted for his poignant portrayals of the rural southern African American experience. The settings of his published works collectively span a period of 110 years and vividly pay homage to the place where he spent the first 15 years of his life: River Lake Plantation in Oscar, Louisiana.” From his biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
A.A. Milne (born Jan. 18, 1882): "A.A. Milne (1882-1956) worked as an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and an adult novelist, in addition to his important contribution as an author of juvenile books. Although he attempted to excel in all literary genres, he was master of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. His nature defied labels, such as "writer of children's literature," even though that was where he excelled. Modern-day readers might be surprised to learn that A.A. Milne did more than just write children's books. ... Milne jumped from one creative venture to another, reluctant to concentrate his attention in one field for any extended period of time." From Encyclopedia of World Biography Online in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Gloria Naylor (born Jan. 25, 1950): “Gloria Naylor was an African American novelist and anthologist. Alongside such figures as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara, she was a key voice in the rich outpouring of literature by African American women in the 1980s and 1990s. Her novels dramatize issues of community, connection, and identity, often through their focus on powerful but careworn women who tend to be the culture bearers for their communities. Orphans and those isolated from family, those seeking identity and community, also frequently people her fictions. Place plays an equally important role, as she tended to create very specific geographies that reflect her narrative structures. Connections interested her, as witnessed by her habit of placing at least one reference in each novel to a character or place or event from one of the others.” From her biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
Virginia Woolf (born Jan. 25, 1882): "Dissatisfied with the novel based on familiar, factual, and external details, Virginia Woolf followed experimental clues to a more internal, subjective, and in a sense more personal rendering of experience than had been provided by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. In the works of these masters the reality of time and experience had formed the stream of consciousness, a concept that probably originated with William James. Virginia Woolf lived in and responded to a world in which certitudes were collapsing under the stresses of changing knowledge, the civilized savagery of war, and new manners and morals. She drew on her personal, sensitive, poetic awareness without rejecting altogether the heritage of literary culture she derived from her family." From Encyclopedia of World Biography Online in the Biography in Context database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number.
