John Hodgman
Before he went on television, JOHN HODGMAN was a humble writer, expert, and Former Professional Literary Agent living in New York City. In this capacity, he has served as the Humor Editor for the New York Times Magazine, Occasional Flight vs. Invisibility Consultant on “This American Life,” Advice Columnist for McSweeney’s, Comic Book Reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and a Freelance Journalist specializing in Food, Non-Wine Alcohol, “Battlestar Galactica,” and most other subjects.
This was enough of a career for any human.
But then he wrote a book of COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE entitled THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE and was asked to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he continues to provide commentary as the show’s Resident
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Merlin Franco
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Felicia Day
Actress, New Media Geek, Gamer, Misanthrope. Voracious reader.
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Felicia Day is a prolific multi-hyphenate. She's the New York Times Bestselling author of "You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)" and the creativity book "Embrace Your Weird", and she recently wrote the Audible series "Third Eye" that won "Best Audio Drama" at the Audie Awards in 2024. She has appeared as an actor in numerous television shows such as “Supernatural”, “Eureka” and “The Magicians” and she can be heard as a voice actor in such shows as "Adventure Time" and "Monster High."
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Jorge Cham is a Chinese-Panamanian post-doc best known for his popular newspaper and web comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics). He first started drawing PhD Comics as a graduate student at Stanford University, and has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in three published book collections.
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Jorge Cham received his Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in 1997, and earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He subsequently worked at Caltech as an instructor and as a researcher on neural prosthetics.
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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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Tanya Thompson
It’s often these little things that flummox me.
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About the author…
Let's just say I’m a mischievous criminal with a penchant for charming my way into trouble and then out of arrest. -
Gina Sheridan
Gina Sheridan grew up in St. Louis, MO in a benevolently chaotic household full of siblings, animals, and books. She holds a B.A. in English Literature, Society, and Politics from Webster University and a Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of Alabama. She has worked as a public librarian in California and Missouri. Her interests include YA fiction, social media, cemeteries, entertaining, urban exploration, and book art. She lives in Old North St. Louis with her husband, Travis, and two cats, Buffalo Plush and Uncle Fez.
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Ian Doescher
Ian is the author of the William Shakespeare Star Wars series and the Pop Shakespeare series, and other books. He's a Portland native, and lives in Portland with his family.
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Nancy Omeara
NANCY OMEARA volunteered on a national religious tolerance hotline for over five years , personally answering more than 5,000 calls and helping people resolve all kinds of situations involving deep belief differences. Nancy has lived in seven different countries, and visited a dozen others, interacting with people of diverse religions, backgrounds and values. The concepts in this book stem from her personal experiences.
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Find out more at: authornancyomeara.com -
Felicia Day
Actress, New Media Geek, Gamer, Misanthrope. Voracious reader.
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Felicia Day is a prolific multi-hyphenate. She's the New York Times Bestselling author of "You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)" and the creativity book "Embrace Your Weird", and she recently wrote the Audible series "Third Eye" that won "Best Audio Drama" at the Audie Awards in 2024. She has appeared as an actor in numerous television shows such as “Supernatural”, “Eureka” and “The Magicians” and she can be heard as a voice actor in such shows as "Adventure Time" and "Monster High."
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Tim Krabbé
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Lisa Lutz
Lisa Lutz is the New York Times bestselling author of the six books in the Spellman series, How to Start a Fire, Heads you Lose (with David Hayward), and the children's book, How to Negotiate Everything (illustrated by Jaime Temairik). Her latest book, The Passenger, a psychological thriller, will be published March 2016 by Simon and Schuster. Lutz has won the Alex award and has been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel.
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Although she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, the University of Leeds in England, and San Francisco State University, she still does not have a bachelor's degree. Lisa spent most of the 1990s hopping through a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting the screenplay Plan B, a mob comedy. After the f -
Alton Brown
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Brown received a degree in drama from the University of Georgia. He first worked in cinematography and film production, and was the director of photography on the music video for R.E.M.'s "The One I Love". He also worked as a steadicam operator on the Spike Lee film School Daze.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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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.
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Bill Watterson
Bill Watterson (born William Boyd Watterson II) is an American cartoonist, and the author of the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes". His career as a syndicated cartoonist ran from 1985 to 1995; he stopped drawing "Calvin and Hobbes" at the end of 1995 with a short statement to newspaper editors and his fans that he felt he had achieved all he could in the comic strip medium. During the early years of his career he produced several drawings and additional contributions for "Target: The Political Cartoon Quarterly". Watterson is known for his views on licensing and comic syndication, as well as for his reclusive nature.
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Al Franken
Alan Stuart "Al" Franken is an Emmy Award–winning American comedian, writer, progressive political commentator, and, recently, politician. He gained fame as a writer and a performer for Saturday Night Live, eventually writing and appearing in several films. Since then, Franken has become more known for his political commentary, writing numerous bestselling books and hosting a nationally-syndicated radio show on Air America Radio.
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He is currently the United States Senator from Minnesota.
On February 14, 2007, Franken announced his candidacy for the 2008 United States Senate election in Minnesota as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and was nominated by that party on June 7, 2008. He won the Democratic Party primary on September 9, -
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 -
Stephen Colbert
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Colbert originally studied to be an actor, but became interested in improvisational theater when he met famed Second City director Del Close while attending Northwestern University. He first performed professionally as an understudy for Steve Carell at Second City Chicago; among his troupe mates were comedians Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris, with whom he developed the critically-acclaimed sketch comedy series Exit 57.
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Amy Sedaris
Amy Louise Sedaris is an American actress, comedian, and writer. Most recently, she has appeared in both The Mandalorian (2019–2023) and The Book of Boba Fett (2022) as Peli Motto. She played Jerri Blank in the Comedy Central comedy series Strangers with Candy (1999–2000) and the prequel film Strangers with Candy (2005), which she also wrote.
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Sedaris appeared as Hurshe Heartshe in the Adult Swim comedy series The Heart, She Holler (2013–2014), as Princess Carolyn in the Netflix animated comedy-drama series BoJack Horseman (2014–2020), and as Mimi Kanasis in the Netflix sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2020). She received further critical acclaim as the creator and star of the TruTV surreal comedy series At Home with Amy Sedaris (2017–2 -
Janet Evanovich
Janet Evanovich is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stephanie Plum series, the Lizzy and Diesel series, twelve romance novels, the Alexandra Barnaby novels and Trouble Maker graphic novel, and How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author, as well as the Fox and O'Hare series with co-author Lee Goldberg.
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Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart is an American comedian, writer, producer, director, political commentator, actor, and television host. He is a host of The Daily Show, a satirical news program on Comedy Central, and previously hosted from 1999 to 2015, before returning as a host of the show in 2024. He hosted The Problem with Jon Stewart (2021–2023) on Apple TV+. Stewart has received numerous accolades, including 22 Primetime Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and five Peabody Awards. He was honored with the Bronze Medallion in 2019, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2022.
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Stewart started as a stand-up comedian but branched into television as host of Short Attention Span Theater for Comedy Central. He went on to host You Wrote It, You Watch It (1992–1 -
Douglas Adams
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, humourist, and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG). Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
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James Howe
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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James Howe has written more than eighty books in the thirty-plus years he's been writing for young readers. It sometimes confuses people that the author of the humorous Bunnicula series also wrote the dark young adult novel, The Watcher, or such beginning reader series as Pinky and Rex and the E.B. White Read Aloud Award-winning Houndsley and Catina and its sequels. But from the beginning of his career (which came about somewhat by accident after asking himself what kind of vampire a rabbit might make), he has been most interested in letting his imagination take him in whatever direction it cared to. So far, his imagi -
Gary Clemenceau
Gary Clemenceau is a cult author, artist, and lyricist. He's usually not boring, but you never know.
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(Past winner of Frank Herbert and Ernest Hemingway lookalike contests.) -
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James Howe
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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James Howe has written more than eighty books in the thirty-plus years he's been writing for young readers. It sometimes confuses people that the author of the humorous Bunnicula series also wrote the dark young adult novel, The Watcher, or such beginning reader series as Pinky and Rex and the E.B. White Read Aloud Award-winning Houndsley and Catina and its sequels. But from the beginning of his career (which came about somewhat by accident after asking himself what kind of vampire a rabbit might make), he has been most interested in letting his imagination take him in whatever direction it cared to. So far, his imagi -
Robert Olmstead
Robert Olmstead (born January 3, 1954) is an award-winning American novelist and educator.
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Olmstead was born in 1954 in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He grew up on a farm. After high school, he enrolled at Davidson College with a football scholarship, but left school after three semesters in which he compiled a poor academic record. He later attended Syracuse University, where he studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and received both bachelor's and master's degrees, in 1977 and 1983, respectively.
He is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University. Olmstead teaches in the -
Dave Holmes
Dave Holmes is a writer, comedian, and television personality who has hosted shows for MTV, CBS, Bravo, Comedy Central, E!, FX, and Ovation. Recently named one of NPR’s 10 Favorite Pop Culture Personalities, he is a editor-at-large for Esquire.com, an on-air personality on SiriusXM’s The Spectrum, and a performer at the iO West and Upright Citizens Brigade theaters . He lives in Los Angeles.
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Photo credit: Caryn Leigh Posnansky -
Adam Resnick
Adam Resnick is an American comedy writer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He is best known for his work writing for Late Night with David Letterman. Additionally, Resnick co-created and wrote for Get A Life with David Mirkin and Chris Elliot
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Hopwood DePree
Hopwood DePree grew up in Holland, Michigan, where one of his neighbors once said "he wasn't that great of a kid."
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As a young adult, he fled for the bright lights of L.A. where he successfully landed a job in front of a restaurant as a dancing chicken. The next day he was fired for not being “enthusiastic enough”.
He managed to graduate from the University of Southern California, beginning his career as an actor and independent filmmaker with his first film, “Rhinoskin” – a comedic documentary that followed his hapless adventures attempting to break into the entertainment industry. Having charged up $20,000 on his credit cards to make the film, he crossed his fingers and hoped for the best. Fortunately, he found critical success on the film f