Metro Library Commission of Oklahoma County
Metro Library Commission of Oklahoma County
With a fluid and wide-ranging style, bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult has been compared to writers as diverse as Alice Hoffman, John Grisham, and Daphne du Maurier. In some two dozen novels, she examines important social issues that are as thought-provoking as they are divisive. Her fiction nods to many genres, including literary fiction, legal thrillers, psychological portraits, romances, and ghost stories, giving her readers a fresh experience with each book. Picoult has an estimated 40 million books in print. The past fourteen of her novels have debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and five of her books have been made into movies.
Picoult’s first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, weaves five narrative voices into a story of love, loss, and self-discovery, which Publishers Weekly called a “powerful and affecting novel that demonstrates there are as many truths to a story as there are people to tell it.” Her critically acclaimed third book, Picture Perfect, is the story of an anthropologist trapped in a cycle of domestic abuse with her glamorous movie star husband. Library Journal praised the novel as “an important book from a talented writer we hope to hear from again and again.” In My Sister’s Keeper, Picoult tells the story of a thirteen-year-old, Anna, who was conceived by her parents specifically as a bone-marrow donor for her sister Kate, who has leukemia. The novel focuses on Anna’s search for identity in a life that was predetermined by her genetic ability to help her sister. Kirkus declared that Picoult “vividly evokes the physical and psychic toll a desperately sick child imposes on a family, even a close and loving one.” Her novel Nineteen Minutes was the winner of the NH Library Association’s Flume Award and winner of the Iowa HS Book Award. Entertainment Weekly called it “vintage Picoult, expertly crafted, thought-provoking, and compelling” and gave it an A grade.
In her recent novels, Picoult has taken on some of the most consequential social issues of our day. Small Great Things, “one of the hardest” books yet for her to write, explores racism in America through the lens of a tragic incident at a Connecticut hospital. The Washington Post praised the novel as “the most important novel Jodi Picoult has ever written.” A film adaptation from Amblin Entertainment is in the works, with Viola Davis and Julia Roberts attached as stars. Another instant New York Times #1 bestseller, A Spark of Light is a powerful and provocative novel about reproductive rights set during a hostage situation at a women’s health clinic. The Star-Tribune called it “a courageous and important work” and it will be adapted into a limited television series by Sony Pictures TV starring Joey King. Other bestsellers include Wish You Were Here and Mad Honey, co-authored with Jennifer Finney Boylan.
Picoult’s first YA novel, co-written with her daughter Samantha van Leer, Between the Lines, was adapted into an Off-Broadway musical. She also wrote the musical adaptation of Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief which opened at the UK’s Octagon Theatre and is slated to open on the West End in 2025, as well as the original musical Breathe with co-librettist Timothy Allen McDonald.
Her latest novel, By Any Other Name, is an “inspiring” (Elle) story about two women, centuries apart—one of whom, Emilia Bassano, is thought by some historians to be the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—who are forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard. A story about how women have been written out of history by men—and how little has changed in 400 years—By Any Other Name debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, was named an IndieNext pick and selected for the LibraryReads list.
In 2003, Picoult was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction. She has also received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association, the BookBrowse Diamond Award for novel of the year, a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the Romance Writers of America, Cosmopolitan’s Fun Fearless Fiction Award, Waterstone’s Author of the Year in the UK, a Vermont Green Mountain Book Award, a NH Granite State Book Award, a Virginia Reader’s Choice Award, the Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award, and a Maryland Black-Eyed Susan Award. Picoult was the 2013-14 recipient of the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Literary Merit and the 2019 Sarah Josepha Hale Award. She received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Dartmouth College in 2010 and another from the University of New Haven in 2012.
She and her husband Tim live in Hanover, New Hampshire with a Springer spaniel, two rescue puppies, two donkeys, ten chickens, and the occasional Holstein.
James Patterson is arguably the greatest storyteller of our time. He is the creator of unforgettable characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Jane Effing Smith, and Maximum Ride, and of breathtaking true stories about the Kennedys, John Lennon, and Princess Diana, as well as our military heroes, police officers, and ER nurses. He has coauthored #1 bestselling novels with Bill Clinton and Dolly Parton, has told the story of his own life in James Patterson by James Patterson, and has received an Edgar Award, nine Emmy Awards, the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, and the National Humanities Medal.
KEVIN KWAN is the author of Crazy Rich Asians, the international bestselling novel that has been translated into 40 languages. Its sequel, China Rich Girlfriend, was released in 2015, and Rich People Problems, the final book in the trilogy, followed in 2017. For several weeks in 2018, the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy commanded the top three positions of the New York Times bestseller list – an almost unprecedented single-author trifecta, and the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians became Hollywood’s highest grossing romantic comedy in over a decade. His latest bestseller Sex & Vanity is currently being adapted into a feature film at Sony Pictures. In 2018, Kevin was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, publisher, and New York Times Bestselling author of 39 books, including SWING, BECOMING MUHAMMAD ALI, co-authored with James Patterson, REBOUND, which was shortlisted for prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, The Caldecott Medal and Newbery Honor-winning picture book, THE UNDEFEATED, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and his NEWBERY medal-winning middle grade novel, THE CROSSOVER.
His newest releases are THE DOOR OF NO RETURN, book one of a new trilogy that is destined to be a game changer, and AN AMERICAN STORY. His memoir, WHY FATHERS CRY AT NIGHT, was released in May, 2023. A regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, Kwame is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, The Coretta Scott King Author Honor, Three NAACP Image Award Nominations, and the 2017 Inaugural Pat Conroy Legacy Award.
In 2018, he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana, as a part of LEAP for Ghana, an international literacy program he co-founded. He is the writer and executive producer of THE CROSSOVER TV series on Disney+.
Elizabeth Strout is an award-winning and bestselling author of several works including the Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, which was developed for a limited television series starring actress Frances McDormand.
In both short stories and fiction, Strout has received numerous awards and recognition. Her sequel, Olive Again, is an Oprah Book Club Pick; Anything Is Possible, is the winner of the Story Prize; The Burgess Boys was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and NPR. Each time, Strout has landed on the NYT bestseller list.
Born in Portland, Maine, Strout grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. She was also drawn to books, and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers, and was already studying – on her own – the way American writers, in particular, told their stories. Poetry was something she read and memorized; by the age of sixteen was sending out stories to magazines. Her first story was published when she was twenty-six.
Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English. Later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law degree along with a Certificate in Gerontology. Her latest novel, Oh, William! was released in 2021.
Kristin Hannah is an award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels including the international blockbuster, The Nightingale, Winter Garden, Night Road, and Firefly Lane.
Her novel, The Nightingale, has been published in 43 languages and is currently in movie production at TriStar Pictures, which also optioned her novel, The Great Alone. Her novel, Home Front has been optioned for film by 1492 Films (produced the Oscar-nominated The Help) with Chris Columbus attached to direct.
Kristin is a former-lawyer-turned writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband. Her novel, Firefly Lane, became a runaway bestseller in 2009, a touchstone novel that brought women together, and The Nightingale, in 2015 was voted a best book of the year by Amazon, Buzzfeed, iTunes, Library Journal, Paste, The Wall Street Journal and The Week. Additionally, the novel won the coveted Goodreads and People’s Choice Awards. The audiobook of The Nightingale won the Audiobook of the Year Award in the fiction category.
Lee Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV’s “golden age.” During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series.
Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment. Lee has several homes—an apartment in Manhattan, country houses in England and the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar’s Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
Lisa’s writing career began with her first novel, Everywhere That Mary Went, published in 1994 by HarperCollins Publishers. The novel became a bestseller and was nominated for the Edgar Award, the most prestigious award given in crime fiction, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America. Lisa’s second novel, Final Appeal, was also nominated for and received an Edgar Award. Since then she has written 26 novels, all of which have appeared on bestseller lists, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Publisher’s Weekly.
Writing & Books
A list of her books in chronological order is: Everywhere That Mary Went (1994); Final Appeal (1995); Running From the Law (1996); Legal Tender (1997); Rough Justice (1998); Mistaken Identity (1999); Moment of Truth (2000); The Vendetta Defense (2001); Courting Trouble (2002); Dead Ringer (2003); Killer Smile (2004); Devil’s Corner (2005); Dirty Blonde (2006), Daddy’s Girl (2007), Look Again (2009), Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog (2009), Think Twice (2010), My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space (2010), Save Me (2011), Best Friends, Occasional Enemies (2011), Come Home (2012), Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim (2012), Don’t Go (2013), Accused (2013), Keep Quiet (2014), Have a Nice Guilt Trip (2014), Betrayed (2014), Every Fifteen Minutes (2015), Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat (2015), Corrupted (2015), and Most Wanted (2016).
Lisa and her daughter Francesca also write a Sunday humor column, “Chick Wit”, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. These stories have been collected in a New York Times bestselling series of books including the most recent, Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat? Scottoline presently has 30 million copies in print in the United States, not including audio, eBook and various large print editions. Internationally, Lisa is published in 35 countries.
Legal Career
Lisa began her legal career with a clerkship for President Judge Edmund B. Spaeth, Jr. of the Pennsylvania Superior Court. When the clerkship ended, she joined Dechert, Price & Rhoads in Philadelphia as an associate. In 1986, she left the firm to raise her newborn daughter and began writing legal fiction part-time. In 1994, Scottoline re-entered the legal world as an administrative law clerk to Chief Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, while beginning a new career as a fiction author, with the publication of her first novel.
Lisa also joined the faculty as a visiting professor at The University of Pennsylvania Law School to teach a course she created entitled “Justice and Fiction.”
As an award-winning journalist reporting on the war from the soldiers’ perspective, Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington spent weeks at a time at a remote outpost that saw more combat than almost anywhere else in the country. This resulted in his best-sellerWAR, as well as Restrepo.
Junger became a fixture in the international media when, as a first-time author, he commanded the New York Times best-seller list for more than three years with The Perfect Storm, which became a major motion picture starring George Clooney.
His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000, profiling Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, became the subject of the National Geographic documentary Into the Forbidden Zone. In 2001, his expertise and experience reporting in Afghanistan led him to cover the war as a special correspondent for ABC News and Vanity Fair. His work has also been published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Men’s Journal. He has reported on the LURD besiegement of Monrovia in Liberia, human rights abuses in Sierra Leone, war crimes in Kosovo, the peacekeeping mission in Cyprus, wildfire in the American West, guerilla war in Afghanistan, and hostage-taking in Kashmir. He has worked as a freelance radio correspondent during the war in Bosnia.
Junger is a native New Englander and a graduate of Wesleyan University. Attracted since childhood to “extreme situations and people at the edges of things,” Junger worked as a high-climber for tree removal companies. After a chainsaw injury, he decided to focus on journalism, primarily writing about people with dangerous jobs, from fire-fighting to commercial fishing (which led, of course, to The Perfect Storm).
In 1998 Junger established The Perfect Storm Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides educational opportunities for children of people in the maritime professions.
P. J. O’Rourke was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, and attended Miami University and Johns Hopkins. He began writing funny things in 1960s “underground” newspapers, became editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, then spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly as the world’s only trouble-spot humorist, going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other “Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries. He is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken fellow at the Cato Institute, a member of the editorial board ofWorld Affairs and a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait… Wait… Don’t Tell Me. He lives with his family in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get.
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat in the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and history at a high school in Kabul. In 1976, the Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris. They were ready to re turn to Kabul in 1980, but by then their homeland had witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet Army. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States, and in September 1980 moved to San Jose, California. Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1988. The following year he entered the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, where he earned a medical degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai medical center in Los Angeles and was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.
In March 2001, while practicing medicine, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner. Published by Riverhead Books in 2003, that debut went on to become an international bestseller and beloved classic, sold in at least seventy countries and spending more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In May 2007, his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, remaining in that spot for fifteen weeks and nearly an entire year on the bestseller list. Together, the two books have sold more than 10 million copies in the United States and more than 38 million copies worldwide. The Kite Runner was adapted into a graphic novel of the same name in 2011. Hosseini’s much-awaited third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, will be published on May 21, 2013.
In 2006, Hosseini was named a Goodwill Envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Inspired by a trip he made to Afghanistan with the UNHCR, he later established The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. He lives in Northern California.
David McCullough has been widely acclaimed as a “master of the art of narrative history,” “a matchless writer.” He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, twice winner of the National Book Award, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
Mr. McCullough’s most recent book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, the number one New York Times best seller, has been called “dazzling,” “an epic of ideas … history to be savored.” His previous work, 1776, has been acclaimed “a classic,” while John Adams, published in 2001, remains one of the most praised and widely read American biographies of all time. More than three million copies are in print and it is presently in its 82nd printing.
In the words of the citation accompanying his honorary degree from Yale, “As an historian, he paints with words, giving us pictures of the American people that live, breathe, and above all, confront the fundamental issues of courage, achievement, and moral character.”
Mr. McCullough’s other books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Path between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, Brave Companions, and Truman. His work has been translated and published in 15 countries around the world, and, in all, more than 10,000,000 copies are in print. As may be said of few writers, none of his books has ever been out of print.
David McCullough is also twice winner of the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize, and for his work overall he has been honored by the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award and the National Humanities Medal. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received forty seven honorary degrees.
He has been an editor, essayist, teacher, lecturer, and familiar presence on public television — as host of “Smithsonian World,” “The American Experience,” and narrator of numerous documentaries including Ken Burns’s “The Civil War.” His is also the narrator’s voice in the movie “Seabiscuit.”
Born in Pittsburgh in 1933, Mr. McCullough was educated there and at Yale, where he was graduated with honors in English literature. He is an avid reader, traveler, and has enjoyed a lifelong interest in art and architecture. He is as well a devoted painter. Mr. McCullough and his wife Rosalee Barnes McCullough have five children and nineteen grandchildren.
Mary Higgins Clark is the best-selling author of thirty-two suspense novels. Her first book, a 1968 historical novel about George Washington, was re-issued with the title “Mount Vernon Love Story” in 2002. With the publication of “Where Are the Children?” in 1975, she launched her career as a world-renowned writer of suspense thrillers. Her memoir, “Kitchen Privileges,” was published in 2002, while her first children’s book, “Ghost Ship,” illustrated by Wendell Minor, was published in 2007.
The New York Times has credited Mrs. Clark for “her intuitive grasp of the anxieties of everyday life that can spiral into full blown terror.” Critics have also praised her as a “superb storyteller” who “creates nightmarish situations that lie just beneath the surface of ordinary life.”
Mrs. Clark has been awarded 18 honorary doctorates, including one from her alma mater, Fordham University. Among her numerous honors and awards, she was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, the highest honor that can be offered to a layperson by the Pope. In 2001 she was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and she was inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame in 2011.
In a letter to her readers in the 30th anniversary edition of her debut suspense novel, “Where Are the Children?”, Mrs. Clark writes, “One of the definitions of happiness is ‘to love what you do’ and I’ve been blessed because that gift was given to me. Over these years I have enjoyed telling stories and meeting so many of the wonderful people who are my readers, and I thank you for that.”
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