esmeralda

esmeralda edited the summary of Dave Eggers Thursday, May 8, 2008.

• Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in the Chicago, Illinois suburb of Lake Forest (where he was a high-school classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn),and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.He lives in San Francisco and is married to the writer Vendela Vida.In October 2005, Vendela gave birth to a daughter, October Adelaide Eggers Vida.
  
  Eggers's brother Bill is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research on privatization. His sister, Beth, claimed that Eggers grossly understated her role in raising their brother Toph and made use of her journals in writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius without compensating her.She later recanted her claims in a posting on her brother's own website McSweeney's Internet Tendency, referring to the incident as "a really terrible LaToya Jackson moment". On March 1, 2002, the New York Post reported that Beth, then a lawyer in Modesto, California, had committed suicide.Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's.
  
  Eggers was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish: for community members to personally engage with local public schools.
  
  
  Literary work
  2007 Brooklyn Book Festival showcases borough's continued literary traditionEggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell, then Smart Feller) for SF Weekly.His first book was a memoir (with fictional elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). It focuses on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the sudden deaths of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy, apologetic postscript entitled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making".
  
  In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003 and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for its Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically-themed serials for Salon.com. In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, compiling the book of interviews with exonerees once sentenced to death. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, "a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician."Novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice. Eggers's most recent novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney's, 2006), was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.Eggers is also the editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.
  
  Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house. McSweeney's produces a quarterly literary journal, McSweeney's, first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by wife Vida; and, beginning in 2005, a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and the "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey" children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the US national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, a book published with aid of the journal Granta, that contained essays about each competing team in the tournament.
  
  Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children that he cofounded in 2002. Eggers has recruited volunteers to operate similar programs in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National. In 2006, he appeared at a series of fundraising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart and David Byrne. In September 2007, the Heinz Foundations awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz award given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals". The award will be used to fund some of the 826 Valencia writing centers.
  

esmeralda edited the summary of Susie Bright Thursday, May 8, 2008.

• Susannah "Susie" Bright (also known as Susie Sexpert) (born March 25, 1958, Arlington, Virginia) is a writer, speaker, teacher, audio-show host, performer, all on the subject of sexuality. She is one of the first writers/activists referred to as a sex-positive feminist.<1>
  
  She has a weekly program entitled In Bed with Susie Bright distributed through audible.com, where she discusses a variety of social, freedom of speech and sex-related topics. Interviews, book and movie reviews are common, as are letters from listeners. The show generally begins with a monologue on current events. The show concludes with a letters-segment and the catch-phrase "Clits up!"
  
  Her website has operated since March 1997, and she began her blog in 2004.
  
  Susie Bright was active in the 1970s in various left-wing progressive causes, in particular the feminist and anti-war movements. She was also one of the founding members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and wrote under the pseudonym Sue Daniels.<2>
  
  Bright co-founded and edited the first women's sex-magazine, On Our Backs, "entertainment for the adventurous lesbian," from 1984 to 1991. She founded the first women's erotica book-series, Herotica, and edited the first three volumes. She started The Best American Erotica series in 1993, which she publishes to this day. She was the choreographer/consultant for the Wachowski Brothers film, Bound (in which she also had a cameo appearance). Bright also appeared as herself in an episode of the HBO series Six Feet Under.
  
  Bright taught the first university class on the subject of the aesthetics and politics of pornography at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1986, and became well-known for her scholarship in sexual representation through her courses on the subject at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
  
  Bright was the first female critic of the X-Rated Critics Organization in 1986, and wrote feminist reviews of erotic films for Penthouse Forum from 1986-1989. Her film-reviews of mainstream movies are widely published, and her comments on gay film history are featured in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet
  
  She has one daughter, Aretha Bright, and lives with her partner, Jon Bailiff. She currently resides in Santa Cruz, California. Her father was the linguist William Bright.
  

esmeralda edited the bio of Madeleine Wickham Thursday, May 8, 2008.

esmeralda edited the summary of Madeleine Wickham Thursday, May 8, 2008.

• Madeleine Wickham (nee Townley), under her own name and the pseudonym, Sophie Kinsella, is a bestselling British author
  
  Educated at Putney High School and New College, Oxford, she worked as a financial journalist before turning to fiction. She is best known for writing the Shopaholic novels series of chick-lit novels, which focus on the misadventures of Becky Bloomwood, a financial journalist who cannot manage her own finances. The books follow her life from when her credit card debt first becomes overwhelming ("Confessions of a Shopaholic") to the latest book on being married and having a child ("Shopaholic & Baby"). Throughout the entire series, her obsession with shopping and its resulting complications for her life is a central theme.
  
  The first Shopaholic book is scheduled to be released as a Disney film in 2008, with Isla Fisher playing Becky and Hugh Dancy as Luke Brandon. The film will be set in New York, rather than London, where the book is set.
  
  Sophie lives in Hertfordshire with her husband, Henry Wickham, a headmaster of a boys' prep school. They have been married for 17 years and they have 3 sons, Freddy 11, Hugo 9 and Oscar 2.

esmeralda edited the summary of Madeleine Wickham Thursday, May 8, 2008.

• Educated at Putney High School and New College, Oxford, she worked as a financial journalist before turning to fiction. She is best known for writing the Shopaholic novels series of chick-lit novels, which focus on the misadventures of Becky Bloomwood, a financial journalist who cannot manage her own finances. The books follow her life from when her credit card debt first becomes overwhelming ("Confessions of a Shopaholic") to the latest book on being married and having a child ("Shopaholic & Baby"). Throughout the entire series, her obsession with shopping and its resulting complications for her life is a central theme.
  
  The first Shopaholic book is scheduled to be released as a Disney film in 2008, with Isla Fisher playing Becky and Hugh Dancy as Luke Brandon. The film will be set in New York, rather than London, where the book is set.
  
  Sophie lives in Hertfordshire with her husband, Henry Wickham, a headmaster of a boys' prep school. They have been married for 17 years and they have 3 sons, Freddy 11, Hugo 9 and Oscar 2.
  

esmeralda changed Unknown Name's author image Thursday, May 8, 2008.

esmeralda changed Ga?bor Tolnai's author image Thursday, May 8, 2008.

esmeralda edited the summary of Andre Dubus Tuesday, May 6, 2008.

• The Garden of Last Days will be published on June 2, 2008.
  For tour dates visit GardenofLastDays.com

esmeralda edited the bio of Andre Dubus Tuesday, May 6, 2008.

esmeralda edited the bio of Andre Dubus Tuesday, May 6, 2008.