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.

Raymond set a new standard of calm, analytical, fact-driven reporting, famously declaring in his first editorial: "We do not mean to write as if we were in a passion, unless that shall really be the case; and we shall take care that it shall not be the case very often."

A poet who wrote her way out of a childhood with almost nothing.

Lorraine Hansberry Photo Credit: David Attie/Getty Images A note from our founder Our sixteenth tribute goes to a playwright who made Broadway history at 29 and spent her final creative years in a home she bought herself in Clinton Hill. Lorraine Hansberry never stopped using her platform to push further, right up until pancreatic cancer cut her career tragically short. A Childhood Forged in a Landmark Case Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in C

A body of work that started with a kid reading science fiction he was technically supposed to be selling, not reading.

How the human mind uses imagination to make meaning in a world that had lost its traditional religious certainties.

Brown Girl, Brownstones, one of the first American novels to portray the complex inner life, psychological struggle, and cultural identity of a young Black immigrant woman with real depth.

Bernard Malamud spent years teaching night classes just to keep writing — and eventually became one of the defining voices of Jewish-American literature.

Hubert Selby Jr. was born and raised in Red Hook, nearly died at sea, and turned to writing only because illness had taken almost everything else from him.

A rented room and, later, a loft across the river in Brooklyn, where he finally found the space to write.

A novelist who wrote standing up, in torrents, and who spent some of his loneliest, most productive years in a drafty Cobble Hill apartment he never quite learned to love.

A writer who understood loneliness better than almost anyone in American fiction

Richard Wright wrote his most explosive book on the stone benches of Fort Greene Park.

A poet who turned precision into a kind of magic — and who became one of Fort Greene's most recognizable residents in the process.

Death of a Salesman — the play that would win him both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award.

A writer who turned a childhood of real hardship into one of the most beloved coming-of-age novels America has ever produced.

His name became almost synonymous with the neighborhood, and Brooklyn's reputation as a literary capital owes no small part to his presence there.

Capote's defining achievement came in 1966 with In Cold Blood, his meticulously reported account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. The book didn't just tell a true story...

In 1855, working with his own money, Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at a print shop in Brooklyn Heights, reportedly setting some of the type by hand.