Library Foundation

Writing and theater were Lorna Landvik’s twin passions when she was growing up in Minneapolis. She made her debut as a novelist in 1996 with the critically acclaimed Patty Jane’s House of Curl. She is also the author of Your Oasis on Flame Lake, The Tall Pine Polka, Welcome to the Great Mysterious, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, Oh My Stars, and her newest novel, The View From Mount Joy. Lorna Landvik has continued to nurture her interest in theater, appearing with the nationally-acclaimed improvisational group Dudley Riggs and acting in numerous plays including Lunatic Cellmates and Valley of the Dolls.

On a backpacking expedition through Europe in 1973, Bryson found his life’s calling as a writer and world traveler. After settling in England, he became a reporter for the English newspapers, The Times and The Independent, and supplemented his income as a travel writer. In 1989, Bryson published his first travel book, The Lost Continent, a hilarious memoir of taking trips through small-town America in his mother’s Chevy. Since then, he has become one of the world’s most beloved and prolific writers, chronicling everything from hiking the Appalachian Trail in the immensely popular A Walk in the Woods to his experience of moving from England to the United States in I’m a Stranger Here Myself. His newest book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, will be released in the fall of 2010.

Patchett’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. Her other award-winning works include Taft (awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction), The Magician’s Assistant (winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship), and Truth & Beauty (named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly). She is perhaps best known for Bel Canto, which won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, sold over a million copies in the U.S. and has been translated into thirty languages. Patchett has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Gourmet, and Vogue.

Doty’s work has received numerous awards and fellowships including the National Book Critics Circle Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, Guggenheim fellowship, and others. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K. Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Widely anthologized, he has published eight books of poems, including School of the Arts, Source, and Sweet Machine, as well as four volumes of nonfiction prose including the New York Times bestseller Dog Years.

Eggers is the author of seven titles, including You Shall Know Our Velocity (winner of the Independent Book Award). What Is the What (which chronicles the life of a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan), and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is also the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco. In 2002 he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. In 2008, Utne Reader listed Eggers as one of their “50 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World."