Sylvia Plath(1932-1963) began publishing poems and stories as a teenager and had laready won several poetry prizes by the time she entered Smith College in 1950. In 1955 she won a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge University, where she met Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. Plath was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for her Collected Poems.

John Lithgow is an award-winning actor who has starred on stage, film, and television. A New York Times bestselling author of eight books for children, he lives in New York and Los Angeles.