Cheryl Strayed (born September 17, 1968) is an American novelist and essayist living in Portland, Oregon. Her autobiographical debut novel, Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006. Strayed also writes the advice column "Dear Sugar".

Strayed was born in Spangler, Pennsylvania,^{[citation needed]} and was raised in Minnesota. She graduated from McGregor High School in Aitkin County, Minnesota, a place upon which the fictional Coltrap County in Torch is based. She received her BA from the University of Minnesota and her MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University, where she was mentored by writers George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill among others. She is married to filmmaker Brian Lindstrom.

Strayed's essays have been published in The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times Magazine and other journals. Her work has been selected twice for inclusion in The Best American Essays ("Heroin/e" in the 2000 edition, and "The Love of My Life" in the 2003 edition). Torch, a story based on Strayed's mother's death from cancer at age 45, was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of 2006 by writers living in the Pacific Northwest.

George Mark Paul Stroumboulopoulos (pronounced /strɒmbəˈlɒpələs/; born August 16, 1972) is a Canadian television and radio personality, best known as the host of CBC Television's George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight (formerly The Hour; a talk show about the world's current events) and being a VJ for Canadian music television channel MuchMusic. Stroumboulopoulos studied Radio Broadcasting at Toronto's Humber College.

He was born in Malton, Ontario, Canada, to a Greek father from Egypt and a Ukrainian mother who was also part Indian. He was raised in Toronto primarily by his mother, and a close-knit extended family.

In the second quarter of 1993, Stroumboulopoulos worked for a rock radio station in Kelowna, B.C., for a few months before getting a job offer at the Toronto radio station Fan 590 AM, working in talk radio for about four years before moving to MuchMusic.

From 2000–2004, Stroumboulopoulos worked at MuchMusic as producer and host of The Punk Show, then host of The NewMusic, MuchLOUD and MuchNews.

Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was for a time the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Anne Lamott (born April 10, 1954) is a novelist and non-fiction writer. She is also a political activist, public speaker and writing teacher. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical. Marked by their self-deprecating humor and openness, Lamott's writings cover such subjects as alcoholism, single motherhood, depression and Christianity.

Lamott was born in San Francisco, and is a graduate of Drew School. Her father, Kenneth Lamott, was also a writer. His death was the focus of her first published novel Hard Laughter. She has one son, Sam, who was born in 1989 and a grandson, Jax, born on July 20, 2009.

Lamott's life was documented in Freida Lee Mock's 1999 documentary Bird by Bird with Annie: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott. Because of the documentary and her following on Facebook and other online networks, she is often called the "People's Author".

Lamott has described why she writes:

I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.