21st-century American women writers

Erika Mailman is an American author and journalist. Mailman was born in the United States, growing up in Vermont and attending both Colby College and the University of Arizona, Tucson. She later began writing a column for the Montclarion edition of the Contra Costa Times. She has lived in Oakland, California for the last 7 years. She has taught at Chabot College in Hayward, California.Mailman, born in Vermont to a German-American family, is the descendant of a woman who twice stood trial for witchcraft in the Salem witch trials in 1692.Mailman's debut novel The Witch's Trinity reportedly sold for six-figures. It is set in a medieval German town in 1487 and examines the struggle between Christianity and pagan tradition through the story of a Christian woman on trial for witchcraft.

Alethea Kontis is an American writer of Teen & Young Adult Books, picture books and speculative fiction, primarily for children, as well as an essayist and storyteller. She is represented by Moe Ferrara at Bookends Literary Agency.

Joanna McClure (born November 10, 1930) is an American poet associated with the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation. According to author Brenda Knight, McClure wrote prolifically from the 1950s onward, filling dozens of artist's notebooks with poems and producing "as much writing as [Jack] Kerouac did, though she kept much of hers private."The child of Henry and Ramona Kinnison, McClure grew up on a ranch near Oracle, Arizona, north of Tucson. After the family lost the ranch during the Great Depression, McClure lived for a time in Tucson, then Hermosillo, Mexico, and Guatemala City, Guatemala, before returning to Tucson to study literature and history at the University of Arizona. She married Albert Hall, a chemist, in 1951, but the marriage ended in divorce. Still in Tucson, she met Michael McClure, a university student who later rose to prominence as a Beat poet. In 1954, she moved to San Francisco, involving herself in the Beat scene and befriending Miriam and Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Phillip Whalen, and other writers and artists. The McClures married in 1954, and their daughter, Jane, was born in 1956. The family moved briefly to New York City in the 1960s before returning to San Francisco, where Joanna pursued her interests in poetry and in early childhood education. The McClures later divorced but remain connected by poetry.

Morgan Parker (born December 19, 1987) is an American poet, novelist, and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books, 2015), There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), and Magical Negro (Tin House Books, 2019), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also author of the young adult novel, Who Put This Song On (Delacorte Press, 2019).

Stella Rush (April 30, 1925 – July 25, 2015), also known by her pen name Sten Russell, was an American journalist and LGBT rights activist. She was a regular reporter for the gay rights magazine ONE (1954–1961) and the lesbian rights magazine The Ladder (1957–1968).

Nancy Farmer (born 1941) is an American writer of children's and young adult books and science fiction. She has written three Newbery Honor Books and won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2002.

Jean Shinoda Bolen (born June 29, 1936) is an American psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and author. She is of Japanese descent. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, she is an emeritus clinical professor of psychiatry at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, UCSF Medical Center and member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the author of thirteen books in over one hundred foreign editions. She was an NGO delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (2002-2018).

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

Ruth McCue Bell Graham (June 10, 1920 – June 14, 2007) was a Chinese-born American Christian author, most well known as the wife of evangelist Billy Graham. She was born in Qingjiang, Jiangsu, Republic of China, the second of five children. Her parents, Virginia Leftwich Bell and L. Nelson Bell, were medical missionaries at the Presbyterian Hospital 300 miles (480 km) north of Shanghai. At age 13 she was enrolled in Pyeng Yang Foreign School in Pyongyang, Korea, where she studied for three years. She completed her high school education at Montreat, North Carolina, while her parents were there on furlough. She graduated from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.
The Grahams met at Wheaton College and were married in the summer of 1943, shortly after their graduation. Ruth Graham became a minister's wife for a brief period in Western Springs, Illinois. She lived out the rest of her life in Montreat, North Carolina. The Grahams have five children: Virginia (Gigi), Anne, Ruth, Franklin, and Nelson Edman (Ned), 19 grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren.
Graham wrote a number of books, including some co-authored with her daughter Gigi Graham.

Carrie Allen McCray (October 4, 1913 – July 25, 2008) was an African-American writer.