Creative nonfiction (also known as literary or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact, but is not primarily written in service to its craft. As a genre, creative nonfiction is still relatively young, and is only beginning to be scrutinized with the same critical analysis given to fiction and poetry. It is sometimes referred to as docufiction.^{[citation needed]}

For a text to be considered creative nonfiction, it must be factually accurate, and written with attention to literary style and technique. “Ultimately, the primary goal of the creative nonfiction writer is to communicate information, just like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction.” Forms within this genre include personal essays, memoir, travel writing, food writing, biography, literary journalism, and other hybridized essays. Critic Chris Anderson claims that the genre can be understood best by splitting it into two subcategories—the personal essay and the journalistic essay—but the genre is currently defined by its lack of established conventions.

Lena Dunham ( /ˈlinə ˈdənəm/ LEE-nə DUN-um; born May 13, 1986) is an American filmmaker and actress. She directed the independent film Tiny Furniture (2010), and is the creator and star of the HBO series Girls.

Dunham was born in New York City and is the daughter of Laurie Simmons, a photographer and designer, and Carroll Dunham, a painter. Dunham attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, NY, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and co-star in the HBO series Girls, Jemima Kirke.

She graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, where she studied creative arts. Her father is Protestant (Dunham has said that her father is a Mayflower descendant) and her mother is Jewish; Dunham has stated that she feels "very culturally Jewish".

Dunham's 2010 feature film, Tiny Furniture, won Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. Dunham herself plays the lead role of Aura.

Dunham's television series, Girls, was greenlit by HBO in early 2012. The show is executive produced by Judd Apatow. Three episodes were screened to positive response at the 2011 South by Southwest Festival. The series premiered April 15, 2012.

Lee Gutkind (born 1945) is an American writer.

Gurkind is the founder of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction and the author or editor of over a dozen books. He started the first ever MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh. Currently, he is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.

Gutkind was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and educated at the University of Pittsburgh. Formally a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, a mid-life father and a literary whipping boy, Lee Gutkind was an unlikely success, as he explained in his previous book, Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather. His upcoming book, entitled, Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, is a follow-up to his memoir Forever Fat. His immersion experiences into the motorcycle subculture, the organ transplant milieu, baseball umpires and in other heretofore un-mined worlds about which he has written books, along with the literary techniques he has developed, has helped to create a new paradigm for writing about the world — the “literature of reality” that is creative nonfiction.

Susan Orlean (born October 31, 1955) is an American journalist. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside.

Susan Orlean is the author of several books, including The Orchid Thief, a profile of Florida orchid grower, breeder, and collector John Laroche. The book formed the basis of Charlie Kaufman's script for the Spike Jonze film Adaptation. Orlean (portrayed by Meryl Streep in an Oscar-nominated role) was, in effect, made into a fictional character; the movie portrayed her as becoming Laroche's lover and partner in a drug production operation, in which orchids were processed into a fictional psychoactive substance.

She also wrote the Women's Outside article, "Life's Swell" (published 1998). The article, a feature on a group of young surfer girls in Maui, was the basis of the film Blue Crush.

In 1999, she co-wrote "The Skinny: What Every Skinny Woman Knows About Dieting (And Won't Tell You!)" under her married name, Susan Sistrom. Her previously published magazine stories have been compiled in two collections, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People and My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere. She also served as editor for Best American Essays 2005 and Best American Travel Writing 2007. She contributed the Ohio chapter in State By State (2008). She recently published a biographical history about the dog actor Rin Tin Tin. She discussed the book on The Colbert Report on 17 November 2011.

Mel Allen (Hebrew name: Mordechai ben Yehuda Elya; February 14, 1913 – June 16, 1996) was an American sportscaster, best known for his long tenure as the primary play-by-play announcer for the New York Yankees. During the peak of his career in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Allen was arguably the most prominent member of his profession, his voice familiar to millions. Years after his death, he is still promoted as having been the "Voice of the New York Yankees." In his later years, he gained a second professional life as the first host of This Week in Baseball.

Allen was born Melvin Allen Israel in Birmingham, Alabama. (Biographer Stephen Borelli notes Allen added the middle name Avrom, to honor a grandfather of his with that name who had died.) The future sportscaster was educated as a lawyer, but a boyhood love for baseball led him to become first a sports columnist and then a radio announcer. He attended the University of Alabama where he was a member of Kappa Nu Fraternity as an undergraduate. He went on to earn a law degree from Alabama as well.