Bruce Sterling Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Bruce Sterling, born April 14, 1954.

Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre.

Sterling’s first science-fiction story, Man-Made Self, was sold in 1976. He is the author of science-fiction novels, including Schismatrix, Islands in the Net, and Heavy Weather. In 1992, he published his first non-fiction book, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier.

He has been interviewed for documentaries such as Freedom Downtime, TechnoCalyps and Traceroute.

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Christopher Hitchens Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Christopher Hitchens, born April 13, 1949.

Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British author, journalist and educator. Author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics and literature, he was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as “one of the ‘four horsemen'” (along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”, is still of mark in philosophy and law.

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Beverly Cleary Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Beverly Cleary, born April 12, 1916.

Beverly Atlee Cleary was an American writer of children’s and young adult fiction. One of America’s most successful authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in 1950. Some of her best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse.

The majority of Cleary’s books are set in the Grant Park neighborhood of northeast Portland, Oregon, where she was raised, and she has been credited as one of the first authors of children’s literature to figure emotional realism in the narratives of her characters, often children in middle-class families. Her first children’s book was Henry Huggins after a question from a kid when Cleary was a librarian. Cleary won the 1981 National Book Award for Ramona and Her Mother and the 1984 Newbery Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw. For her lifetime contributions to American literature, she received the National Medal of Arts, recognition as a Library of Congress Living Legend, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the Association for Library Service to Children. The Beverly Cleary School, a public school in Portland, was named after her, and several statues of her most famous characters were erected in Grant Park in 1995. Cleary died on March 25, 2021, at the age of 104.

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Dorothy Allison Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Dorothy Allison, born April 11, 1949.

Dorothy Allison is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

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Anne Lamott Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Anne Lamott, born April 10, 1954.

Anne Lamott is an American novelist and non-fiction writer.

She is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Lamott is based in Marin County, California. Her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical. Lamott’s writings, marked by their self-deprecating humor and openness, cover such subjects as alcoholism, single-motherhood, depression, and Christianity.

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Charles Baudelaire Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Charles Baudelaire, born April 9, 1821.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also worked as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.

His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing beauty of nature in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire’s original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist.

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Barbara Kingsolver Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Barbara Kingsolver, born April 8, 1955.

Barbara Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family’s attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.

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Donald Barthelme Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Donald Barthelme, born April 7, 1931.

Donald Barthelme Jr. was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

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Charles Jackson Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Charles Jackson, born April 6, 1903.

Charles Reginald Jackson was an American writer. He wrote the 1944 novel The Lost Weekend.

Charles R. Jackson was born in Summit, New Jersey on April 6, 1903, the son of Frederick George and Sarah Williams Jackson. His family moved to Newark, New York in 1907, and nine years later his older sister, Thelma, and younger brother, Richard, were killed while riding in a car that was struck by an express train. He graduated from Newark High School in 1921.[4] He attended Syracuse University, joining a fraternity there, but left during his freshman year after a “furtive sexual encounter with a fellow member of his fraternity, who then spread word of the incident in such a way that only Jackson came in for public disgrace”; a fictionalized version of that experience was later incorporated into The Lost Weekend.

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Anthony Horowitz Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Anthony Horowitz, born April 5, 1955.

Anthony John Horowitz is an English novelist and screenwriter specializing in mystery and suspense. His works for children and young adult readers include the Alex Rider series featuring a 14-year-old British boy who spies for MI6, The Power of Five series (known as The Gatekeepers in the US), and The Diamond Brothers series.

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