21st-century American novelists

Ward Swift Just (September 5, 1935 – December 19, 2019) was an American writer. He was a war correspondent and the author of 19 novels and numerous short stories.

Jack Du Brul (born October 15, 1968 in Burlington, Vermont) is an American author who writes techno-thriller novels.

Richard Scott Prather (September 9, 1921 – February 14, 2007) was an American mystery novelist, best known for creating the "Shell Scott" series. He also wrote under the pseudonyms David Knight and Douglas Ring.

Marie Arana (born Lima, Peru) is an author, editor, journalist, critic, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.

Daniel Alarcón (born March 5, 1977, in Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.
He began his career writing fiction, publishing stories in magazines like The New Yorker, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and his short stories have been widely anthologized. He served as Associate Editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra until 2015. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Peru, and a 2011 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His novel At Night We Walk in Circles was published by Riverhead Books in October 2013. His most recent story collection, The King is Always Above the People, was long-listed for the National Book Award in 2018, and won the 2019 Clarke Prize in Fiction. He received the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' in 2021.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (born January 4, 1933) is an American writer best known for children's and young adult fiction. Naylor is best known for her children's-novel quartet Shiloh (a 1992 Newbery Medal winner) and for her "Alice" book series, one of the most frequently challenged books of the last decade.

James Alexander Craig Thom (May 26, 1933 – January 30, 2023) was an American author, best known for his works in the Western genre and colonial American history which are noted for their historical accuracy borne of his painstaking research. Thom graduated from Butler University in 1961 with a BA in Journalism after serving in the United States Marine Corps in the Korean War. He taught a course in journalism at Indiana University, and was a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post.

Gerald "Jerry" Neal Williamson (April 17, 1932 – December 8, 2005) was an American horror writer and editor known under the name J. N. Williamson. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana he graduated from Shortridge High School. He studied journalism at Butler University. He published his first novel in 1979 and went on to publish more than 40 novels and 150 short stories. In 2003 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Horror Writers of America. He edited the critically acclaimed How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction (1987) which covered the themes of such writing and cited the works of such writers as Robert Bloch, Lee Prosser, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, William F. Nolan, and Stephen King. Many important writers in the genre contributed to the book. Williamson edited the popular anthology series, Masques. Some of his novels include The Ritual (1979), Playmates (1982), Noonspell (1991), The Haunt (1999), among others.
In 1946, Williamson founded The Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis, a Sherlock Holmes scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars.
Williamson recalled in a 2003 interview that his first work of fiction was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche called "The Terrible Death of Crosby, The Banker".

Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950), better known by her pen name Sapphire, is an American author and performance poet.

Sue Alexander (August 20, 1933 – July 3, 2008) was an American writer of children's literature. She authored 26 books for children as well as "scores of stories" for newspapers and magazines. She was also a children's book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times. She was a charter member and advisory board member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, which established two awards in her name in recognition of her efforts to educate and mentor aspiring writers.