1. From Corydon, Indiana, this contemporary writer of rural noir was noted as one of GQ's favorite books of 2011 and a Daily Beast best debut of 2011.  Guns, crime and crystal meth all figure heavily as you laugh out loud along the way.  A film has just been released of his novel.

2. Best known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories, and for his fascination of reworking of the lore of celebrated pulp heroes and other literary mashups.

3. This turn-of-the-century novelist and journalist was a leading voice in the naturalist school.  He comes from Terre Haute.

4.  Although this novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor was born in Fargo, he taught at Purdue for 16 years, so Indiana likes to claim him.  Known for his metafiction as well as his creative non-fiction.

5. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, this prolific writer served in WW11, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was captured and sent to Dresden where he lived in a slaughter house.  Known for his darkly satirical work.

6. Born in Mount Vernon, Indiana, this female writer was a Quaker and she wrote about Indiana Quakers.

7.  Another Hoosier from Indianapolis, who later attended Butler University, this poet, novelist, biographer, professor later became a cherished Greenwich Village eccentric.  When she was 32, her mother and stepfather joined the commune in New Harmony, Indiana, and later she herself moved there for seven years while writing a study of utopian concepts and communities.

8. Described as "the dean of true crime authors" by the Washington Post, and "the best true crime writer around" by Publishers Weekly, this writer’smost popular works investigated the life histories of violent career criminals, including studies of serial rapists such as Arthur Shawcross.

9.  Born in South Bend, Indiana, this poet later lived in Chicago, then New York and Paris, and later settled in San Francisco where he became the central figure in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene from the 30s through the 60s, exercising a major and early influence over the evolution of the area's local artistic culture and social counterculture.  Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time Magazine

10. Although this African-American poet was born in Ohio, she moved to Indiana in 1969 and lived there for many years. She was associated with the Black Arts Movement.  From her most renowned book of poetry in 1970:

I am a black woman tall as a cypress strong beyond all definition still defying place and time and circumstance assailed impervious indestructible.


11.  This contemporary writer’s poems and essays have appeared most recently in Bayou Magazine, Chamber 4, Cincinnati Review, Elixir Magazine, and North American Review. He is the author of four books of poetry as well as a memoir of the Vietnam War that won the Eric Hoffer Award for Legacy Nonfiction.  He is also the author of a nonfiction account of life in the American counter-culture during the 1960s and 1970s, published in 2011. He is editor, along with Tom Watson, of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana.

12.  Born in Chicago, but raised in Bloomington, Indiana, where he later attended Indiana University, this screenwriter, director, and film producer usually works on films based on a true story, and usually about athletics.

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