21st-century American novelists

Mary Abigail Padgett (born May 13, 1942, in Vincennes, Indiana) is an American author of mystery novels who features in Great Women Mystery Writers (2007)

Mark Dunn (born July 12, 1956, in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American author and playwright. He studied film at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) followed by post-graduate work in screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin moving to New York in 1987 where he worked in the New York Public Library while writing plays in his free time.
Among the 35 plays Dunn has written (as of 2023), Belles and Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain have been produced over one hundred and fifty times. Dunn served as playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company and the Community Theatre League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.Dunn is the author of the popular "progressively lipogrammatic" novel Ella Minnow Pea (2001).
In 1998, Dunn sued the writers, distributors and producers of The Truman Show, claiming that the story was based on a play he had written and performed Off-Broadway in 1992, Frank's Life.

Barbara Brooks Wallace (December 3, 1922 – November 27, 2018) was an American children's writer. She won the NLAPW Children's Book Award and International Youth Library "Best of the Best" for Claudia (2001) and William Allen White Children's Book Award for Peppermints in the Parlor (1983).

Edmund Leroy "Mike" Keeley (February 5, 1928 – February 23, 2022) was an American novelist, translator, and essayist, a poet, and Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University. He was a noted expert on the Greek poets C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos, and on post-Second World War Greek history.

Michael Allen McCollum (born 1946 in Phoenix, Arizona) is an American science fiction author and aerospace engineer. He graduated from Arizona State University, where he studied aerospace propulsion and nuclear engineering. He is employed by Honeywell in Tempe, Arizona. In 1997, he founded Sci Fi - Arizona, one of the first author-owned-and-operated virtual bookstores on the Internet. He also conducts writers workshops. Most of his novels have been published as audio books by Audible Inc. They have also been translated into German.

Robert James Waller (August 1, 1939 – March 10, 2017) was an American author best known for The Bridges of Madison County. He was also a professor, photographer, and musician.

John Sandford, pseudonym of John Roswell Camp (born February 23, 1944), is an American New York Times best-selling author, novelist, former journalist, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

Janet Anne Haradon Dailey (May 21, 1944 – December 14, 2013) was an American author of numerous romance novels as Janet Dailey (her married name). Her novels have been translated into nineteen languages and have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. Dailey was both an author and entrepreneur.

Lily Brooks-Dalton (born August 18, 1987) is an American writer. She was born and raised in southern Vermont. Her first book, Motorcycles I've Loved: A Memoir, published in 2015 by Riverhead, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her first novel, Good Morning, Midnight, was published the next year by Random House, and it has been translated into half a dozen languages, with a film adaptation as The Midnight Sky in December 2020 starring and directed by George Clooney.Brooks-Dalton earned a BA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a MFA at Portland State University.

April Bernard (born 1956) is an American poet. She was born and raised in New England, and graduated from Harvard University. She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. In the early 1990s, she taught at Amherst College. In Fall 2003, she was Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books.