Authors 2021 – the VIRTUAL event

is an award-winning historian, professor, and writer. She is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, the president of the African American Intellectual History Society, and an editor for The Washington Post‘s “Made by History” section. Her writing has appeared in popular outlets such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, Politico, and Time. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.

is the New York Times bestselling, USA Today bestselling, and #1 international bestselling author of The Book of Lost Names, The Winemaker’s Wife, and a dozen other novels that have been translated into twenty-eight languages and sold all over the world.

A former reporter for PEOPLE magazine she covered everything from the Super Bowl to high-profile murders to celebrity interviews with the likes of Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, OutKast, Justin Timberlake, and Patrick Dempsey. Her favorite stories at PEOPLE, however, were the “Heroes Among Us” features—tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

In addition to a long magazine writing career (which also included articles published in Travel + Leisure, Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal, Every Day with Rachael Ray, and more), Kristin was also a frequent contributor to the national television morning show The Daily Buzz—where her assignments included flying to London three times to interview the cast of the Harry Potter films—and has appeared on Good Morning America and numerous local television morning shows.

She is also the co-founder and co-host of the weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction.

is the USA Today and international bestselling author of the nonfiction spy thrillers  CODE NAME: LISE: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy and Into the Lion’s Mouth: The True Story of Dusko Popov—World War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real-Life Inspiration for James Bond.  His third nonfiction thriller, The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffith, Countess of Romanones (Atria/Simon & Schuster), will be released February 9, 2021.  His books have been translated into multiple languages around the world, including Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, and Serbian.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Mr. Loftis was a corporate attorney, publishing scholarly legal articles in the University of Florida Law Review, Suffolk Transnational Law Journal, Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, Florida Bar Journal, National Law Journal, and Florida Banking.  He also has served as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Florida Law School, where he taught writing and appellate advocacy.  He received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Florida, where he served on the Law Review as Senior Executive Editor and Senior Articles Editor.

has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1989. She is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “Rugrats,” and is the author of several books. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon. She has taught screenwriting and humor writing at Princeton, New York University, and Stonybrook University. She was the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. His most recent book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is available now.

is an American filmmaker and writer who broke into the film industry as the cinematographer on the Coen Brothers’ first three films: Blood Simple,

Raising Arizona, and Miller’s Crossing.  He also was the director of photography on Throw Mamma from the Train, Big, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery.  

Sonnenfeld made his directorial debut with The Addams Family in 1991 and has since gone on to direct a number of films including Addams Family Values, Get Shorty, RV and the first three Men In Blacks.    

His television credits include Pushing Daisies, for which he won Emmy and DGA Awards, and most recently Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. which won a Peabody and was nominated for Emmy and Directors Guild of America Awards each of its three seasons.