A novelist who turned a keen reporter's eye on Brooklyn's own literary scene and produced one of the most talked-about debuts of the last two decades.

A writer whose childhood spanned continents before her fiction ever did.

A writer who moves as freely between literature and visual art as his most famous character moves through the streets of New York.

A writer who turned a devastating college loss into a Pulitzer Prize-winning meditation on friendship, identity, and music.

A poet whose sentences can hold devastation and tenderness in the same breath.

A writer who turned rigorous self-examination into some of the most acclaimed nonfiction of her generation.

A writer who refuses to stay inside any single genre, or any single self.

A novelist who does more with restraint than most writers manage with excess.

A novelist who didn't just write about her Brooklyn community, she built a gathering place for it.

A playwright who holds a distinction no other woman in history has matched.

A writer who turned a childhood spent in competitive debate into one of the most distinctive prose styles in contemporary fiction.

A novelist who has spent her career finding new shapes for fiction to take — from a chapter written entirely as a PowerPoint deck to a Pulitzer-winning meditation on time itself.

A writer who turns the absurdities of modern life into something both funny and quietly devastating.

A writer whose life has crossed more borders than most: Buenos Aires, Sweden, Argentina again, London, and finally New York, where he has made his home in Brooklyn.

A novelist who grew up inside the very neighborhood transformation he'd later write about.

A writer whose entire body of work grew out of two very different childhoods lived in two very different places.

Nunez has built a body of work defined by an unusually intimate, conversational voice.

A writer who built the early years of his novel-writing career out of a series of Fort Greene apartments, and he's gone on to become one of only four writers in history to win two fiction Pulitzers.

He didn't just live near the Brooklyn Bridge. He lived inside its mythology, in a room that seemed almost designed by fate to produce the poem he was destined to write.

Ebb's reach extended well past Broadway. In 1977, he and Kander wrote the theme song for Martin Scorsese's film New York, New York; Liza Minnelli sang it first, but it was Frank Sinatra who turned it into a global anthem.