Each month, we highlight relevant author birthdays to celebrate. In the post below, click on the author’s name to find titles by them in our catalog. Read a little bit about each author, then follow the link to learn more about them in one of our online resources!
Need a TCCL card? Sign up at www.tulsalibrary.org/application and get instant access to digital resources, from e-books to databases and learning tools.
Richard Wright (born Sept. 4, 1908): "Richard Wright was a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and poet. Wright is known for being one of the most important, critically acclaimed, and popular American fiction writers active in the middle of the 20th century. Although Native Son (1940) is considered his master work, he wrote a number of other important novels, essays, autobiographies, and short stories." From his bio in the African American Experience online resource, available HERE.
Sonia Sanchez (born Sept. 8, 1934): "A prominent figure in the Black Arts Movement, Sonia Sanchez is a poet, activist, author, educator, and playwright. She has published dozens of plays, anthologies, and collections of poetry that explore gender relations in black America. Sanchez has continued to shape the tradition of Black Arts through her collaborative projects with contemporary hip-hop artists." From her bio in the African American Experience online resource, available HERE.
Alison Bechdel (born Sept. 10, 1960): "Since the mid-1980s, Alison Bechdel has been a well-known name in the gay community for her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. The successful feature was a comics-page staple of several dozen alternative newspapers for twenty-five years and was regularly collected into book form. 'With each image that Bechdel has created, she invites the lesbian community, both in the United States and internationally, to gaze into a mirror that reflects its passions, politics, and idiosyncrasies,' noted a contributor in Gay & Lesbian Biography. In 2006, Bechdel earned more mainstream media attention for her acclaimed memoir, a graphic novel she titled Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In it, she recounts her youth in a small Pennsylvania town, where her father served as the local mortician--and lived as a closeted gay man, which she learned not long after revealing her own sexual orientation to her parents when she was in college. She received further praise for her 2012 follow-up Are You My Mother?, which details her relationship with her mother. Fun Home was later adapted into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical in 2015." From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Mary Oliver (born Sept. 10, 1935): "Mary Oliver did not lie in the shadows for centuries before receiving her Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984. She has been a very quiet, modest poet, however, whose work reflects a pastoral life lived (first in Ohio, then in Provincetown) with plants and animals far more than with human beings. Her early work was reviewed by both Philip Booth and Joyce Carol Oates as being influenced by Robert Frost, and, like Frost, her first book, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in England." From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
John Steptoe (born Sept. 14, 1950): "John Steptoe was an acclaimed author and illustrator of children's books. Many of his works have been praised for both realistically portraying black life and having universal themes which appeal to children of all races. Steptoe was especially concerned about reaching black children, largely because he felt their literary needs were not being met. He once explained: 'One of my great incentives for getting into writing children's books was the great and disastrous need for books that black children could honestly relate to ... I was amazed to find that no one had successfully written a book in the dialogue black children speak.'" From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Agatha Christie (born Sept. 15, 1980): "Agatha Christie is a towering figure in the history of crime literature for two reasons. First, she consolidated the form of the pure mystery novel, achieving in five or six of her books puzzle stories that set a standard unlikely ever to be decisively bettered. Second, she sold more books than any other writer except Shakespeare. Totaling her sales was a task that defeated her agent and publishers. Her works have been translated into more than a hundred languages. She was, in short, the most successful mystery writer the world has known." From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Tomie DePaola (born Sept. 15, 1934): "Tomie dePaola's creative brush and pen have fashioned more than 200 informational books, imaginative stories, realistic picture books, and folktales, bringing him recognition as a creative writer and illustrator and as a favorite choice of children. Though dePaola has been criticized for being too prolific, a close inspection finds versatility and a distinct style to be the significant hallmarks of his work." From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Stephen King (born Sept. 21, 1947): "Stephen King is a master of the horror genre, skillfully interweaving elements of the supernatural with popular culture and thereby refreshing the standard elements of horror fiction. Immensely scary and frequently violent, King's stories portray believable characters faced with the most appalling circumstances. As a result of his compelling storytelling abilities, King has become one of the best-selling authors of all time and has exerted a profound influence not only on the development of popular literature but also on American popular culture." From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
bell hooks (born Sept. 25, 1952): "A prolific author of more than 17 books, bell hooks has made significant contributions as a writer to the discussion of sexism and racism in contemporary U.S. society. In her numerous books that appeal to academic and popular audiences, her social criticism and theoretical works are especially respected across such academic disciplines as African American studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and film studies. According to hooks, the lowercased first letters of her name emphasize the substance of her ideas and books rather than her authorship; she seeks to separate herself from them to facilitate her own ability to change her interests and ideas." From her bio in the African American Experience online resource, available HERE.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (born Sept. 25, 1964): "Born and raised in Barcelona, Spain, writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón lives and works in Los Angeles, California, where he moved in his late twenties to work as a screenwriter. His first novel, The Shadow of the Wind, is the result of a decision to write a book set in his homeland. Although Ruiz Zafón reads extensively in English and has a particular affection for nineteenth-century English-language novelists, he wrote The Shadow of the Wind in Spanish. The book was first published as La sombra del viento in Spain, where it spent months on the best-seller lists, promoted primarily by word of mouth through the enthusiasm of booksellers." From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Shel Silverstein (born Sept. 25, 1930): "Shel Silverstein was a beloved children's author and artist known for his quirky mix of innocence and irreverence. Adults were known to enjoy his juvenile work as well, perhaps because he was a pioneer in adding a certain edginess to the children's genre. Before his books, most works for youth were mired in sugar-coated sappiness, but Silverstein introduced an element of fun, a touch of satire, a dose of bathroom humor, and sometimes even a bit of the macabre." From the Biography in Context online resource. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.