Cecilia Macheski is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.
Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, including the New York Times bestsellers The Ballad of Tom Dooley and The Ballad of Frankie Silver. Ghost Riders won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book.

Named a Virginia Woman of History by the Library of Virginia and a Woman of the Arts by the Daughters of the American Revolution, McCrumb was awarded a merit award by the West Virginia Library Association in 2017 and the Mary Hobson Prize for Arts & Letters in 2014. Her books have been named New York Times and Los Angeles Times Notable Books.
 

Marge Piercy is the author of the memoir Sleeping with Cats and fifteen novels, including Three Women and Woman on the Edge of Time, as well as sixteen books of poetry, including Colors Passing Through Us, The Art of Blessing the Day, and Circles on the Water. She lives on Cape Cod, with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.

Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. In 1983, Walker became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Her other novels include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. In her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of over seventy books encompassing novels, poetry, criticism, story collections, plays, and essays. Her novel Them won the National Book Award in Fiction in 1970. Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for more than three decades and currently holds the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professorship at Princeton University. 
 
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an abolitionist, writer, and teacher at Hartford Female Seminary. Stowe escaped the restrictions on women of the nineteenth century through her novel writing and antislavery activism. Stowe is best known for her depiction of African American life before the Civil War in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was extremely influential in both the United States and Britain.