James Moffett Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to James Moffett, born May 23, 1929.

James Moffett was an American teacher of English, author, and theorist of the teaching and learning of language arts and especially writing.

James Moffett was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1929. After growing up in the southern US, he spent his high school years in Toledo, Ohio. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University. Drafted to serve in the military for two years shortly after graduation, and after a stint as a teaching assistant for S. I. Hayakawa, he thereafter taught at Philips Exeter Academy for ten years. He then took a faculty position in Harvard’s Graduate school of Education for three years while he worked on his first major work Teaching the Universe of Discourse.

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Arthur Conan Doyle Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Arthur Conan Doyle, born May 22, 1859.

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle’s early short stories, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

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Alexander Pope Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Alexander Pope, born May 21, 1688.

Alexander Pope was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translations of Homer.

Pope is often quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common parlance (e.g. “damning with faint praise” or “to err is human; to forgive, divine”).

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Douglas Preston Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Douglas Preston, born May 20, 1956.

Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child (including the Agent Pendergast series and Gideon Crew series), he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.

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Jodi Picoult Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Jodi Picoult, born May 19, 1966.

Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American writer. Picoult has published 28 novels and short stories, and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Approximately 40 million copies of her books are in print worldwide and have been translated into 34 languages. In 2003, she was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction.

Picoult writes popular fiction which can be characterised as family saga. She frequently centers storylines on a moral dilemma or a procedural drama which pits family members against one another. She is often characterised as an author of chick-lit. Over her writing career, Picoult has covered a wide range of controversial or moral issues, including abortion, the Holocaust, assisted suicide, race relations, eugenics, LGBT rights, fertility issues, religion, the death penalty, and school shootings. She has been described as “a paradox, a hugely popular, at times controversial writer, ignored by academia, who questions notions of what constitutes literature simply by doing what she does best.”

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Andrew Gross Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Andrew Gross, born May 18, 1952.

Andrew Gross is an American author of thriller novels, including four New York Times bestsellers. He is best known for his collaborations with suspense writer James Patterson. Gross’s books feature close family bonds, relationships characterized by loss or betrayal, and a large degree of emotional resonance which generally leads to wider crimes and cover-ups. The books have all been published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.

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Anna Jameson Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Anna Jameson, born May 17, 1794.

Anna Brownell Jameson was an Anglo-Irish art historian whose work spanned art and literary criticism, philosophy, travel writing, and feminism. She became very well known for her extensive writings. Jameson was connected to some of the most prominent names of the period including Joanna Baillie, Fanny Kemble, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning, Harriet Martineau, Ottilie von Goethe (the daughter-in-law of Goethe), Lady Byron, Harriet Hosmer, Ada Lovelace, Charles and Elizabeth Eastlake, and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.

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Adrienne Rich Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Adrienne Rich, born May 16, 1929.

Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called “one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century”, and was credited with bringing “the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse”. Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the “lesbian continuum”, which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women’s lives.

Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by icon W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden went on to write the introduction to the book. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts to protest House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

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David Almond Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to David Almond, born May 15, 1951.

David Almond is a British author who has written many novels for children and young adults from 1998, each one receiving critical acclaim.

He is one of thirty children’s writers, and one of three from the UK, to win the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award. For the 70th anniversary of the British Carnegie Medal in 2007, his debut novel Skellig was named one of the top ten Medal-winning works, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for a public election of the all-time favorite. It ranked third in the public vote from that shortlist.

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Eoin Colfer Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Eoin Colfer, born May 14, 1965.

Eoin Colfer is an Irish author of children’s books. He worked as a primary school teacher before he became a full-time writer. He is best known for being the author of the Artemis Fowl series. In September 2008, Colfer was commissioned to write the sixth installment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, titled And Another Thing …, which was published in October 2009. In October 2016, in a contract with Marvel Comics, he released Iron Man: The Gauntlet. He served as Laureate na nÓg (Ireland’s Children’s Laureate) between 2014 and 2016.

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To check out “Poems in the Key of Carlin,” or to see what else Curious Penman has to offer, check out our Browse Books page.