Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is the author of acclaimed works of fiction like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) as well as the feminist call to arms, A Room of One's Own (1929). Born to a wealthy family in South Kensington, London, Woolf was the seventh child of eight. Her mother died in 1895 and Woolf experienced her first mental breakdown; two years later, Woolf's stepsister and surrogate mother, Stella Duckworth, also died. After attending the Ladies' Department of King's College London, Woolf started to write seriously with the encouragement of her father. Woolf's father died in 1905 and Woolf experienced a second mental breakdown. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and in 1917 they founded Hogarth Press. At the age of 37, Woolf published her second novel, Night and Day.

She continued to have a successful literary career and is remembered as one of the most important modernist writers of the twentieth century. Woolf also had an affair with peer and author VitaSackville-West, who is the inspiration for the main character in Orlando (1928). At the age of 59, Woolf drowned herself in a river; she struggled with bouts of depression and bipolar disorder throughout her life. Lauren Groff is the author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award. Her third novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kirkus Award. It won the 2015 American Booksellers' Association Indies' Choice Award for Fiction, was a New York Times Notable book and Bestseller, Amazon.

com's #1 book of 2015, and on over two dozen best-of 2015 lists. It also received the 2016 American Bookseller Association's Indies' Choice Award for Adult Fiction and, in France, the Madame Figaro Grand Prix de l'Heroine. Her most recent collection of stories, Florida, released in June 2018, has been named a finalist for the National Book Award. Named by Granta Magazine as one of the Best of Young American Novelists of her generation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Fiction, Lauren Groff lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband, two sons, and dog. Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017). She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine. She is at work on a graphic essay collection, Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness, and Terrible Men, a graphic novel, both forthcoming from Pantheon. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, GQ, The New Yorker's Page Turner," Oxford American, and many other places.

Find her on Twitter @kristenradtke.".