Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

Author Bio: Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an American-Israeli writer, poet, and novelist. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Arabic and political science. A recipient of a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature, his work has been published in the New York Times, Haaretz, and elsewhere.

Author Bio: Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of a collection of short stories, a collection of essays, and fourteen novels, including Midnight's Children, which won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker. He has also published four works of nonfiction and coedited two anthologies. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, hewas knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Author Bio: Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, the author of several books of fiction, is the recipient of the 2019 New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association’s 2019 Legacy Award for lifetime achievement. Her works including the New York Times bestseller Manhattan Beach, as well as A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Books Critics Circle Award; The Keep, a national bestseller; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award finalist; and The Invisible Circus, which was adapted into a major motion picture. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, McSweeney’s, the New York Times Magazine, and many others.

Author Bio: Morgan Parker

Author Bio: Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the nonfiction book, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He teaches at Yale University.

Author Bio: Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; Koolaids; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize.

Author Bio: George Saunders

George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; and others. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Author Bio: William Finnegan

William Finnegan is the author of several books, including the memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. He has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1987.

Author Bio: Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders is an American journalist, editor, and fiction writer. Her novel Choir Boy won a Lambda Literary Award in 2005. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is managing editor of the science fiction website io9.com.

Author Bio: Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is a multiaward–winning author of Native American descent. She twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, for her debut novel, Love Medicine, and for LaRose. The Plague of Doves, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Many of her books have made the New York Times bestsellers list. She has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the World Fantasy Award, and American Academy of Poets Prize, among many other honors. She has also written poetry, children’s books, short stories, a memoir, and other works of nonfiction.

Author Bio: Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Berkeley, California.

Author Bio: various authors

Author Bio: Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for First Novel, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Author Bio: Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is the author of eight novels, four works of nonfiction, and two children’s books. Several of her books have been New York Times bestsellers, with Commonwealth reaching the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Women’s Prize in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year, and The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the co-owner of Parnassus Books.

Author Bio: Steven Okazaki

Author Bio: Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, collections of short stories and essays, and a young-adult novel. Titles include Wonder Boys, which was made into a critically acclaimed film; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, among others.

Author Bio: Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is the author of twelve books, including A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award, and What Is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of France’s Prix Médicis Étranger and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Guardian, the New Yorker, and the Best American Essays. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and cofounder of Voice of Witness, a book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. He is the cofounder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers with locations around the country, and of ScholarMarch, which connects donors with students to make college accessible. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Author Bio: Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction and recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.

Author Bio: Héctor Tobar

Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of Translation Nation and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Author Bio: Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, the #1 New York Times bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton, and the New York Times bestseller The Burgess Boys, as well as Abide with Me, a Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including the New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine.