Lyman Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, on May 15, 1856. Over the course of his life, Baum raised fancy poultry, sold fireworks, managed an opera house, opened a department store, and edited a newspaper before finally turning to writing. In 1900, he published his best known book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which became a sensation and spawned a franchise that would far outlive its creator. The book was adapted into a hugely successful stage musical in 1902, and decades later inspired the iconic 1939 MGM film. Eventually Baum wrote fifty-five novels, including thirteen Oz books, plus four "lost" novels, eighty-three short stories, more than two hundred poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings. He was also an early experimenter in film, founding the Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 to produce silent movie adaptations of his work. Baum died on May 6, 1919. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.David Plunkert is an art director, illustrator, and co-founder of Spur Design in Baltimore Maryland. Dave’s work has been collected by the Library of Congress, The Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, and The Lucas Narrative Museum, as well as exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Design Museum of London. He has received gold medals from the Society of Illustrators, and awarded Best Magazine Cover of the Year by The American Society of Magazine Editors for his August 28th, 2017 cover of The New Yorker. He has designed and illustrated postage stamps for the USPS, produced music videos for They Might be Giants, and over designed over 90 posters for Theatre Project Baltimore. He was inducted into the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 2011. Dave designed and illustrated hardcover editions of Edgar Allan Poe’s: Stories and Poems and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The 200th Anniversary Edition: published in 2018 by Rockport. He received the Hamilton King Award from The Society of Illustrators in 2025.Kelly Link's debut collection, Stranger Things Happen, was a Firecracker nominee and Salon Book of the Year. Stories from it won the Nebula, James Tiptree Jr., and World Fantasy Awards. Her second collection, Magic for Beginners, was a Book Sense pick and made best-of-the-year lists at Time, Salon, and the Village Voice. Kelly co-edits The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror with Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow, and edited the anthology Trampoline. She holds a BA from Columbia and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and publish the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.Gore Vidal received the National Book Award and was the author of numerous novels, short stories, plays, and essays. His fiction includes landmark works such as Myra Breckinridge and the historical novel Lincoln, part of his seven-volume Narratives of Empire series spanning American history from the founding era to the mid-twentieth century. He was also a prolific essayist and critic, contributing regularly to publications such as The New York Review of Books. Beyond writing, Vidal was a political activist; as the Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in that district in a half-century. He also ran for the U.S. Senate in California. A fixture of American public intellectual life, he was known for his sharp wit and willingness to provoke, memorably clashing with William F. Buckley Jr. on national television during the 1968 political conventions.
