Baratunde R. Thurston

Baratunde Rafiq Thurston is an American comedian based in Boston and New York City. A politically-active, technology-loving comedian, he co-founded the black political blog, Jack and Jill Politics and serves as Director of Digital for "The Onion." Baratunde travels the world speaking and advising and performs standup regularly in NYC. He resides in Brooklyn, lives on Twitter and has over 30 years experience being black.

Thurston is the author of three self-published books, "Better than Crying: Poking Fun at Politics, the Press & Pop Culture," "Keep Jerry Falwell Away from My Oreo Cookies" and "Thank You Congressional Pages (For Being So Damn Sexy!)" His fourth book, entitled "How to Be Black" was published on February 1, 2012.

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Eric Garcia

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Amrou Al-Kadhi

Amrou Al-Kadhi is the founder of drag troupe Denim and has several TV shows currently in development. Amrou has written an episode for Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon’s upcoming series for Apple (US), Little America, as well as for BBC America’s hotly anticipated series, The Watch. Amrou has written and directed four short films and has features in development with Film4, the BFI and BBC films. Their journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, Gay Times, Attitude, CNN and Little White Lies, among other publications. Unicorn is Amrou’s first book.
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Merlin Franco

Merlin Franco is an Indian-born academic with a PhD in Ethnobiology. He currently lives in Borneo with his imaginary girlfriend and a gang of feral monkeys. Merlin’s hobbies include staring at the ceiling, stroking his greying beard, and running away from stray dogs.
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Jemar Tisby

Jemar Tisby is president and co-founder of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective. He has written about race, religion, and culture for The Washington Post, CNN, Vox, Christianity Today and The New York Times. He is the co-host of the Pass The Mic podcast, which is frequently rated as one of the top 100 religion and faith podcasts on iTunes. Tisby is a PhD student in history at the University of Mississippi, studying race and religion in the 20th century, and he has spoken to thousands at colleges, conferences, and churches across the country on such topics as “Understanding the Heart Cry of Black Lives Matter,” “The Historical Politics of Race in America,” and “The Image of God and the Minority Experience.” In 2017, the Religion News As
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W. Kamau Bell

W. Kamau Bell is a socio-political stand-up comedian and television host whose most prominent work focuses on race and politics in America.
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Sarah Cooper

SARAH COOPER is a writer and comedian who had a former life in the tech world. Her books include 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings (2016), How to Be Successful without Hurting Men's Feelings (2018), and her debut memoir Foolish: Tales of Assimilation, Determination and Humiliation (2023). Cooper went viral in 2020 with her Trump lip-sync videos, leading to Netflix special Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine, and appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The View and the New York Times Best Performers list. Most recently, she appeared in Jerry Seinfeld's directorial debut Unfrosted: The Pop-tart Story (2024). Cooper is married to a Pomeranian named Buddy with whom she shares a home in Brooklyn.
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Yaa Gyasi

YAA GYASI was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held a Dean's Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

YAA GYASI is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit prhspeakers.com.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom has been called "a master of metaphor" (Soraya McDonald), one of "America's most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time" (Rebecca Traister) and "one of the finest public intellectuals writing today" (Roxane Gay). McMillan Cottom centers black women in uncommonly incisive analysis of social problems. She lives in Richmond, Virginia where she is an associate professor of sociology.
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Nick Offerman

Nick Offerman is an American actor, writer, and carpenter who is best known for his breakout role as Ron Swanson in the acclaimed NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation. For his work on Parks and Recreation, he received the Television Critics Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy.
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Lydia Kang

I love salt more than chocolate. I'm somewhat small, yet deceptively strong. Sort of like an ant.

I'm a part time doc, full time family member, and if you offer me snacks, I'll be a friend for life.

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I have three nonfiction adult titles written with Nate Pederson: QUACKERY: A Short History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, 2017; PATIENT
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Tim Minchin

Timothy David "Tim" Minchin is an Australian-British comedian, actor, and musician.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Minchin
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Sarah Silverman

Sarah Kate Silverman is an Emmy-winning American comedian, writer, singer, guitarist, and actress. Although usually credited as Sarah Silverman, she is sometimes credited by her nickname, Big S. Her satirical comedy addresses social taboos and controversial topics such as racism, sexism, and religion.

She often performs her act as a caricature of a Jewish-American princess, mocking bigotry and stereotypes of ethnic groups and religious denominations, by endorsing them ironically. Silverman was first noticed as a writer and occasional performer on Saturday Night Live. She now stars in and produces The Sarah Silverman Program, which debuted February 1, 2007, on Comedy Central.
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Gary Clemenceau

Gary Clemenceau is a cult author, artist, and lyricist. He's usually not boring, but you never know.

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Omekongo Dibinga

Omekongo Dibinga, PhD.
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Stuart MacBride

Aka Stuart B. MacBride

The life and times of a bearded write-ist.

Stuart MacBride (that's me) was born in Dumbarton -- which is Glasgow as far as I'm concerned -- moving up to Aberdeen at the tender age of two, when fashions were questionable. Nothing much happened for years and years and years: learned to play the recorder, then forgot how when they changed from little coloured dots to proper musical notes (why the hell couldn't they have taught us the notes in the first bloody place? I could have been performing my earth-shattering rendition of 'Three Blind Mice' at the Albert Hall by now!); appeared in some bizarre World War Two musical production; did my best to avoid eating haggis and generally ran about the place a lot.

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Arlie Russell Hochschild

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Craig Ferguson

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Craig Ferguson is a Scottish-American comedian, television host, actor, and writer. He is the current host of CBS's The Late Late Show, a role which earned him an Emmy nomination in 2006. He became an American citizen on February 1, 2008.
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Judd Apatow

Judd Apatow is an Emmy Award-winning American film producer, screenwriter, director and former stand-up comedian. He is best known for producing a distinct series of critically and commercially successful comedy-style films, including Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, and Funny People. He is the founder of Apatow Productions, a film production company that also developed the critically acclaimed cult television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared.
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Lane Smith

Lane Smith was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but moved to Corona, California at a young age. He spent summers in Tulsa, however, and cites experiences there as inspirations for his work, saying that "[o]nce you've seen a 100-foot cement buffalo on top of a donut-stand (sic) in the middle of nowhere, you're never the same."

He studied art in college at the encouragement of his high school art teacher, helping to pay for it by working as a janitor at Disneyland. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration, and moved to New York City, where he was hired to do illustrations for various publications including Time, Mother Jones, and Ms..

Smith is married to Molly Leach, who is a book designer and designed the Smith/Scieszka collaboration.
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Jerome Allen "Jerry" Seinfeld (born April 29, 1954) is an American comedian, actor and writer, whose style is often described as observational comedy. He is best known for playing a semi-fictional version of himself in the situation comedy, Seinfeld, (1989-1998), which he co-created, helped write and, in the show's final two seasons, executive produced. In his first major foray back into the media since the finale of Seinfeld, he co-wrote and co-produced the film Bee Movie, also dubbing the title role of Barry B. Benson. In February 2009, it was announced that Jerry Seinfeld will be participating in a reality TV series tentatively called Marriage Ref on NBC. Jerry is rumored to work behind the scenes, mainly operating as creator and executi
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P.G. Wodehouse

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An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English litera
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Stewart O'Nan

Stewart O'Nan is the author of eighteen novels, including Emily, Alone; Last Night at the Lobster; A Prayer for the Dying; Snow Angels; and the forthcoming Ocean State, due out from Grove/Atlantic on March 8th, 2022.

With Stephen King, I’ve also co-written Faithful, a nonfiction account of the 2004 Boston Red Sox, and the e-story “A Face in the Crowd.”

You can catch me at stewart-onan.com, on Twitter @stewartonan and on Facebook @stewartONanAuthor
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Christopher Moore

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Christopher Moore is an American writer of absurdist fiction. He grew up in Mansfield, OH, and attended Ohio State University and Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, CA.

Moore's novels typically involve conflicted everyman characters suddenly struggling through supernatural or extraordinary circumstances. Inheriting a humanism from his love of John Steinbeck and a sense of the absurd from Kurt Vonnegut, Moore is a best-selling author with major cult status.

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W.E.B. Du Bois

In 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced 'doo-boyz') was born in Massachusetts. He attended Fisk College in Nashville, then earned his BA in 1890 and his MS in 1891 from Harvard. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin, then earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1894. He taught economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897-1910. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) made his name, in which he urged black Americans to stand up for their educational and economic rights. Du Bois was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and edited the NAACP's official journal, "Crisis," from 1910 to 1934. Du Bois turned "Crisis" into the foremost black literary journal. The black nationalist ex
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Omekongo Dibinga

Omekongo Dibinga, PhD.
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