Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist.

Robinson (née Summers) was born and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women's college at Brown University, receiving her B.A., magna cum laude in 1966, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977.

Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.

She is also the author of non-fiction works including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), and When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012). She has written articles, essays and reviews for Harper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review.

Paul Elie (born 1965) is an American writer and editor.

His book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction Winners in 2004, and received National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. Since 1993 he has been an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is also a long-time contributor to the Catholic journal Commonweal.

Born in New York, he holds a B.A. from Fordham University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.

Don Brophy, managing editor for the Catholic book publisher Paulist Press, includes The Life You Save May Be Your Own in his 2007 book One Hundred Great Catholic Books from the Early Centuries to the Present.

Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2004. PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000155353.

Robert Bernard Alter (born 1935) is an American professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.

Robert Alter earned his bachelor's degree in English (Columbia University, 1957), and his master's (1958) and doctorate degrees (1962) from Harvard University in comparative literature. He started his career as a writer at Commentary Magazine, where he was for many years a contributing editor. Alter has written twenty-three books, and is noted most recently for his translations of sections of the Bible.

Alter lectures on topics varying from Biblical episodes to Kafka's modernism and Hebrew literature. One of his important contributions is the introduction of the type scene into contemporary scholarly Hebrew Bible studies. An example of a type scene is that of a man meeting a young woman at a well, whom he goes on to marry; this scene occurs twice in Genesis and once in Exodus, and, according to Alter, distortedly in 1 Samuel.

Leonard Lopate (born c. 1941) is host of the public radio talk show The Leonard Lopate Show, broadcast on WNYC. He first broadcast on WKCR, the college radio station of Columbia University—where his brother Phillip was a student—then later at WBAI, before ultimately moving to WNYC.^{[citation needed]}

Lopate came to radio relatively late in life. Born in Brooklyn and growing up in Williamsburg, he attended Brooklyn College and later Hunter College, where he trained as a painter (he studied with Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko), and worked in advertising for fifteen years. But when he was given a chance to host his first talk show on WBAI in 1977, he was hooked, and what began as a whim has become his life's work. Arguably, Lopate's background in art and literature (as well as in the commercial world) has been a major factor in his success.

Lopate's longest running program on WBAI was "Round Midnight", a weekly late-night show, which featured interviews and free-form discussion on a variety of topics with listeners who called in to the station. The show ran through the mid-1980s, ending when Lopate moved to WNYC-FM to host a midday talk show with radio veteran Pegeen Fitzgerald, which evolved into his present-day show.