Amy Tan’s novels, short stories, and essays intimately portray growing up as a first-generation American and explore what it is like to be both separate from and a part of Chinese culture. One of the most famous Chinese American writers today, her works showcase storytelling, memory, and the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, and sisters.
Once called the “German Marie Curie” by Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics. Her joint research with the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann led to the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission…
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has quickly established herself as a powerful author, storyteller, and advocate in literary and lecture circuits. She weaves themes of politics, culture, race, and gender throughout her novels, short stories, and plays, which have received both public and critical acclaim…
American theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner Maria Goeppert Mayer is one half of the team credited with the proposal of the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. This theory uses the Pauli exclusion principle — which states that two or more identical particles with half-integer spins cannot occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system simultaneously…
Laura Ingalls Wilder was an American writer best known for the beloved children’s book series “The Little House On The Prairie,” which told the story of her childhood in a settler and pioneer family. The books, published between 1932 and 1943, were adapted loosely into a successful television show of the same name which aired from 1974 to 1983…
As a child, Vera Rubin would gaze through her bedroom window up into the night sky and marvel at the stars. This fascination with space led to a passion for spiral galaxies and ultimately the confirmation of her theory of the existence of dark matter, which is thought to account for 85% of the matter of the universe…
New York Times best-selling speculative fiction author Maggie Stiefvater is best known for her series of fantasy novels “The Wolves of Mercy Falls” and “The Raven Cycle.” “The Wolves of Mercy Falls” consists of “Shiver,” “Linger,” “Forever,” and “Sinner.” “Shiver” remained on The New York Times bestseller list for more than 40 weeks in 2009…
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler has made a noteworthy career of telling the often less-than-glamorous stories of small-town people enduring life’s everyday ups and downs. The novelist, short story writer, and literary critic describes herself as “a housewife who writes,” and her fully developed characters…
Annie Proulx is an acclaimed author of award-winning and best-selling novels, short story collections, and journalistic pieces. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, “Postcards,” the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel…
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, byname of Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, is an English-born American novelist and short-story writer whose works explore the immigrant experience, and that of East Indians in particular. In English, she has written two short-story collections, “Interpreter of Maladies” and “Unaccustomed Earth,” and two novels…
