W. W. Norton & Company is an independent American book publishing company based in New York City. It has been owned wholly by its employees since the early 1960s. The company is well known for its "Norton Anthologies" (particularly the Norton Anthology of English Literature) and its texts in the "Norton Critical Editions" series, the latter of which are frequently assigned in university literature courses.

W. W. Norton & Company is the largest American book publishing company that has remained independent since its founding. It is the oldest and largest employee-owned publisher in the United States of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, college textbooks, cookbooks, art books, and professional books. The roots of the company date back to 1923. Since the 1950s Norton's college textbook line has expanded to include leading titles in economics, government, history, music, psychology, political science, sociology, and many other academic subjects. Several of its college textbooks, including The Norton Shakespeare, The Enjoyment of Music, A History of Western Music, and new and revised entries in the Norton Anthology and Norton Critical Edition series, have become best sellers in the academic fields. The Norton Professional Books division was founded in 1985 with a line of psychotherapy volumes, expanding to include neuroscience, education, architecture, and design books.

David Shrigley is a British visual artist.

Shrigley was born in Macclesfield on 17 September 1968, the younger of two children born to Rita (née Bowring) and Joseph Shrigley.^{[citation needed]} He moved with his parents and sister to Oadby, Leicestershire, when he was two years old. He did the Art and Design Foundation course at the Leicester Polytechnic in 1987, and then studied Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991.

Although he works in various media, he is best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons released in softcover books or postcard packs.

Like the poet Ivor Cutler, Shrigley finds humour in flat depictions of the inconsequential, the unavailing and the bizarre – although he is far fonder of violent or otherwise disquieting subject matter. Shrigley's work has two of the characteristics often encountered in outsider art – an odd viewpoint, and (in some of his work) a deliberately limited technique. His freehand line is often weak, which jars with his frequent use of a ruler; his forms are often very crude; and annotations in his drawings are poorly executed and frequently contain crossings-out (In authentic outsider art, the artist has no choice but to produce work in his or her own way, even if that work is unconventional in content and inept in execution. In contrast, it is likely that Shrigley has chosen his style and range of subject matter for comic effect).

Cathy Park Hong (born August 7, 1976) is a Korean-American writer born in Los Angeles, California, USA. Much of her work includes mixed language and serialized narrative.

She is a graduate of Oberlin College and has an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

Hong's books of collected poetry include Translating Mo'um, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002 and Dance Dance Revolution, published by W.W. Norton in 2007. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in A Public Space, Paris Review, Poetry, Web Conjunctions, jubilat, Chain, among other journals. She has also written articles for publications like The Village Voice, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, and New York Times Magazine. In 2002 she won a Pushcart Prize for Translating Mo'um and in 2007 she won the Barnard Women Poets Prize.

Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".

Diane Ackerman (born October 7, 1948 in Waukegan, Illinois) is an American author, poet, and naturalist known best for her work A Natural History of the Senses. Her writing style combines poetry, colloquial history, and popular science. She has taught at various universities, including Columbia and Cornell.

Diane Ackerman lived in Waukegan, Illinois until she was 8, when her family moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A., M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1978, where her dissertation advisor was Carl Sagan. Over the years she taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell, Washington University in St. Louis, and other colleges. She has been married to novelist Paul West since 1970. She currently lives in New York state. A collection of her manuscripts, writings and papers (the Diane Ackerman Papers, 1971-1997—Collection No. 6299) is housed at the Cornell University Library.

Ackerman's book A Natural History of the Senses inspired the five-part Nova miniseries Mystery of the Senses, which she hosted. In 2008 she won the Orion Book Award for The Zookeeper's Wife.