February 2024: KRISTIN HARMEL is the New York Times bestselling, USA Today bestselling, and #1 international bestselling author of The Paris Daughter, The Forest of Vanishing Stars, The Book of Lost Names, and a dozen other novels that have been translated into more than 30 languages and are sold all over the world. Shas been writing professionally since the age of 16, when she began her career as a sportswriter, covering Major League Baseball and NHL hockey for a local magazine in Tampa Bay, Florida in the late 1990s. In addition to a long magazine writing career, primarily writing and reporting for PEOPLE magazine (as well as articles published in American Baby, Men’s Health, Woman’s Day, Travel + Leisure, Ladies’ Home Journal, and more), Kristin was also a frequent contributor to the national television morning show The Daily Buzz. Kristin was born just outside Boston, Massachusetts and spent her childhood there, as well as in Worthington, Ohio, and St. Petersburg, Florida. After graduating with a degree in journalism (with a minor in Spanish) from the University of Florida, she spent time living in Paris and Los Angeles and now lives in Orlando, with her husband and young son. She is also the co-founder and co-host of the popular weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction.
March 2023: PETER HELLER is the national best-selling author of The River, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip. Heller has also written the novels Celine, The Painter, The Dog Stars, and The Guide. An award-winning adventure writer and a longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure, and a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. The Dog Stars, which was lauded as a breakout bestseller, has been published in 22 languages and is optioned for a movie (release date TBD). The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award. Heller is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature, Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsango River, and The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammal. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction and lives in Denver, Colorado.
February 2022: AMOR TOWLES graduated from Yale College and received an MA in English from Stanford University. His latest novel, The Lincoln Highway (Viking), became available October 5, 2021 and immediately rose to the bestseller lists. Towle’s first novel, Rules of Civility, was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011. Mr. Towles’s second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 52 weeks in hardcover and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. Born and raised in the Boston area, Mr. Towles now writes in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and two children.
February 2021: TÉA OBREHT became the youngest-ever recipient of the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife in 2011. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. With her second novel, Inland—named by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2019—Obreht graduated from talented newcomer to one of the finest fiction writers of her generation. Obreht’s work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among others. In addition to a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, Obreht received the Rona Jaffe Fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Serving as the 2020-2022 Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University, she splits time between Wyoming and Texas.
February 2020: HAMTPON SIDES is an acclaimed narrative historian best-known for his gripping, deeply researched adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of exploration. He’s the author of the bestselling histories “Ghost Soldiers,” “Blood and Thunder,” “Hellhound on His Trail,” and “In the Kingdom of Ice.” His most recent book, “On Desperate Ground: The Epic Story of the Chosin Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle,” was named a Best Book of the Year by theWashington Post. An editor-at-large at Outside magazine and a contributor to such publications as National Geographic, the American Scholar, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, his journalistic works have been frequently anthologized and have twice been named Finalists at the National Magazine Awards. A native of Memphis and a graduate of Yale, Hampton was a recent fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and is a member of the Society of American Historians. He is also a partner of Atalaya Productions, an independent film company that develops historical stories for the screen. Hampton lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches narrative non-fiction at Colorado College.
February 2019: DR. NNEDI OKORAFOR is an international award-winning novelist and NY Times bestselling author. She was born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents. She writes African-based science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. She is the author of the Black Panther: Long Live the King book by Marvel Comics and is also the author of the new standalone comic book series about Black Panther’s little sister Shuri. Dr. Okorafor has a passionate YA following for her Binti series. Her children’s book Chicken in the Kitchen won an Africana Book Award. Other books have won the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Her breakout novel Who Fears Death, which is set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, was optioned by HBO and is in development for HBO as a TV series.
February 2018: 
ADAM JOHNSON is the Phil and Penny Knight Professor in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Winner of a Whiting Award and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the author of several books, including Fortune Smiles, which won the 2015 National Book Award, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House and The Best American Short Stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Click here for a Dallas Morning News article about LitFest and Adam Johnson.
February 2017: 
JAMIE FORD is the great grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. His debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to win the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His work has been translated into 34 languages.
February 2016: DAVE EGGERS is the author of ten books, including most recently Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, The Circle, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country and ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible.
February 2015: JEANNETTE WALLS graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, has been a New York Times bestseller for more than six years. It has sold over 2.7 million copies and has been translated into 22 languages. She is also the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers, The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Walls lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.
February 2014: MARK SALZMAN is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction author who has written on a variety of subjects, from a graceful novel about a Carmelite nun’s ecstatic visions and crisis of faith to a compelling memoir about growing up a misfit in a Connecticut suburb – clearly displaying a range that transcends genre. As a boy, all Salzman ever wanted was to be a Kung Fu master, but it was his proficiency on the cello that facilitated his acceptance to Yale at the age of 16. He soon changed his major to Chinese language and philosophy, which took him to mainland China where he taught English for two years and studied martial arts. He never gave up music, though, and Salzman’s cello playing appears on the soundtrack to several films, including the Academy Award-winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien.
February 2013: MARKUS ZUSAK is the author of five books, including the international bestseller, The Book Thief, which is translated into more than forty languages. First released in 2005, The Book Thief has spent a total of 375 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and still remains there eight years after it first came out. His first three books, The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe and When Dogs Cry, released between 1999 and 2001, were all published internationally and garnered a number of awards and honors in his native Australia, and the USA. The Messenger, published in 2002, won the 2003 Australian Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Award (Older Readers) and the 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Award (Ethel Turner Prize), as well as receiving a Printz Honor in America. It also won numerous national readers choice awards across Europe, including the highly regarded Deutscher Jugendliteratur prize in Germany.
February 2012: NAOMI SHIHAB NYE was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University. Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011); You and Yours(BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East; Fuel (BOA Editions, 1998); Red Suitcase (BOA Editions, 1994); and Hugging the Jukebox (Far Corner Books, 1982). She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book award in 1998.
Feb. 2011: Doug Wright
Feb. 2010: Tobias Wolff
Feb. 2009: Billy Collins
Nov. 2007: Scott Simon
Oct. 2006: Anchee Min
Feb. 2006: Kaye Gibbons
Feb. 2005: Michael Chabon
Feb. 2004: Russell Banks
Feb. 2003: George Plimpton
Feb. 2002: Tim O’Brien
Feb. 2001: Don Graham
Feb. 2000: Marion Winik
Feb. 1999: James Kelman
Feb. 1998: Doug Wright – HPHS graduate
Feb. 1997: Carol Higgins Clark & John Marks