May 19 2026
Born on May 19, 1930, Lorraine Hansberry lived only thirty-four years, yet she changed American theater permanently. Best known for A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, Hansberry was also a journalist, essayist, political activist, intellectual, artist, and playwright whose interests extended far beyond …
May 17 2026
Born on May 17, 1957, Peter Høeg became one of Denmark’s most internationally recognized contemporary novelists by writing books that rarely remain inside a single genre for long. His fiction can begin as a crime novel and turn into a meditation on colonialism, move from family history into magical realism, combine boarding-school drama with philosophical …
May 15 2026
Born on May 15, 1938, Nancy Garden helped change young adult literature by writing stories in which LGBTQ+ teenagers could recognize themselves not simply as problems to be solved, but as young people capable of friendship, love, hope, uncertainty, mistakes, and happy futures. Her best-known novel, Annie on My Mind, appeared in 1982 and told …
May 14 2026
Born on May 14, 1900, Hal Borland spent much of his writing life paying attention to things other people hurried past. The first frost on a field, migrating birds overhead, a tree beginning to bud, snow settling across a Connecticut hillside, the changing length of daylight, the arrival of spring flowers, and the nearly invisible …
May 13 2026
Born on May 13, 1944, Armistead Maupin became one of the writers most closely associated with modern San Francisco, transforming the lives, friendships, romances, secrets, and shifting identities of its residents into the beloved Tales of the City series. What began as a newspaper serial in the 1970s eventually grew into ten novels, television adaptations, …
May 11 2026
Born on May 11, 1916, Camilo José Cela became one of the defining voices of twentieth-century Spanish literature. His novels were frequently bleak, grotesque, funny, disturbing and formally adventurous, reflecting a Spain scarred by civil war and struggling through decades of dictatorship and social change. From the brutality of The Family of Pascual Duarte to …
May 10 2026
Born on May 10, 1963, Suzan-Lori Parks has spent her career reshaping what American theater can do with history, language, race, memory, family, and identity. Her plays rarely approach the past as something settled. Instead, history becomes material to be questioned, repeated, rearranged, performed, contradicted, and imagined again. That approach helped make Parks one of …
May 09 2026
Born on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joy Harjo has spent more than five decades creating poetry in which memory, music, land, history, family, grief, survival, and the spiritual world continually speak to one another. A member of the Muscogee Nation, Harjo has become one of the most influential voices in contemporary American literature, …
May 04 2026
Born on May 4, 1006, in Herat, Khwaja Abdullah Ansari became one of the great spiritual voices of the medieval Persian-speaking world. Scholar, teacher, Qur’anic commentator, theologian, mystic, and master of devotional prose, he spent most of his life in and around Herat, the ancient city with which his memory became so closely associated that …
May 03 2026
Born on May 3, 1896, Dodie Smith built one of the most unexpected literary careers of the twentieth century. She trained to be an actress, spent years working in a London department store after her stage ambitions faltered, became one of the successful women playwrights of the 1930s, moved to the United States on the …
