Sarah Fuller (February 15, 1836-August 1, 1927) was an American educator.

She was born in Weston, Massachusetts to Harvey and Celynda (Fiske) Fuller, and was educated at Allan English and Classical School, located in West Newton. After graduating in 1855, she taught in Newton and Boston. In 1869, she trained at the Clarke School for the Deaf under Harriet B. Rogers, then became principal at the newly formed Boston School for Deaf-Mutes; a school founded on the behest of Rev. Dexter S. King. In 1871, the school staff were trained in the skill of teaching deaf children how to speak by Alexander Graham Bell. Sarah became an advocate of this practice, as well as the promotion of education for deaf children starting at the earliest age possible. She was also present when the first message was sent over the telephone.

In 1890, Miss Fuller applied the methods she learned and developed from Bell in giving the first speech lessons to Helen Keller.

In 1888, she published An Illustrated Primer for teachers of the deaf. She helped found the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in 1890, and became director of that association in 1896. She founded the Home for Little Deaf Children in 1902, and retired as a principal in 1910. Sarah died in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, and is buried in Saint Mary's Cemetery.

Christopher P. Lu (simplified Chinese: 卢沛宁; traditional Chinese: 盧沛寧; pinyin: Lú Pèiníng; born June 12, 1966) is Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary for United States President Barack Obama. Lu graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and from Harvard Law School, where he was a classmate of Obama's. He served as a litigation attorney for the Washington, D.C. firm Sidley Austin before taking his first political position as Deputy Chief Counsel for Representative Henry Waxman and the Democratic staff of the United States House Government Reform Committee.

After serving briefly as an advisor on Senator John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, Lu came to work in Barack Obama's U.S. Senate office, where he served as legislative director and acting chief of staff. Following Obama's successful 2008 campaign for presidency, Lu was appointed executive director of the Obama-Biden Transition Project. When Obama appointed Lu as Cabinet Secretary, The New York Times described him as "one of the highest-ranking Asian Americans in the Obama administration".

Geoffrey Wolff (born 1937) is an American novelist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. Among his honors and recognition are the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994) and fellowships of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Berlin (2007), and the Guggenheim Foundation. His younger brother is the writer Tobias Wolff.

Geoffrey Wolff was born in Hollywood, California, to Duke and Rosemary Wolff. His parents separated when he was twelve, his brother living with their mother and Geoffrey with their father. He has described the adventure of his upbringing in an acclaimed memoir of his father, The Duke of Deception (1979), which was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. (Wolff's brother Tobias has treated with similar candor his own upbringing with their mother in a memoir, This Boy's Life.)

Geoffrey Wolff was educated at the Choate School, graduating in 1955; at Princeton (which he anatomized in his 1990 novel Final Club), graduating summa cum laude in 1960; and at Cambridge University. He has taught at Robert Collge (now Boğaziçi University), in Istanbul, at Princeton, and at the University of California, Irvine, where he was professor of English and comparative literature and, from 1995 to 2006, director of the influential Graduate Fiction Program. He has also been a book editor at the Washington Post and at Newsweek.

Christopher Hope (born 26 February 1944) is a South African novelist and poet who is known for his controversial works dealing with racism and politics in South Africa.

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Dudley Mitford and Kathleen Margaret Hope. As an Afrikaner in South Africa, Hope questioned the special treatment of Caucasians in that country. These feelings would eventually work their way into Hope's most famous writings.^{[citation needed]} Hope was educated at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Natal. He served in the South African Navy beginning in 1962. Hope married Eleanor Marilyn Margaret Klein 18 February 1967. The couple would eventually divorce. Hope worked briefly as a journalist before leaving on a "self-imposed" exile to London, England. His autobiographical piece, White Boy Running, chronicles this time of Hope's life.

Hope's poetry was first published in Whitewashes, a poetry book that was released in 1971. In 1974, his poetry was published as Cape Drives, a collection of original prose. Hope's first novel, A Separate Development, was published in 1981. The novel was banned in South Africa for its overt criticisms of the Apartheid government

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Hindi: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (Nastaʿlīq);  /sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989.

Rushdie was appointed Commandeur dans Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.