Maya Angelou, poet and author of the groundbreaking, bestselling memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” died in May at age 86. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez greets fans on his 87th birthday. The Nobel Prize-winning author of “100 Years of Solitude” died about a month later, in April. (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)
Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, known for her literary critiques of apartheid, died in South Africa in July; she was 90. (Ulf Andersen / Getty Images)
Poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka, shown reading in 2003, died in January at age 79. (Robert Abbott Sengstacke / Getty Images)
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Norman Bridwell, creator of Clifford the Big Red Dog, died at age 86 in December. (Stuart Ramson / Associated Press)
National Book Award-winning novelist Peter Matthiessen, a co-founder of The Paris Review, died in April at age 86. (Ee Betz / Associated Press)
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand, shown at the 1999 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, died in November at age 80. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell, shown in 1985, died in October at age 87. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
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Lauren Bacall in 1950 with her husband, Humphrey Bogart. Bacall, who wrote three candid memoirs, told The Times, “Writing a book is the most complete experience I’ve ever had.” She died in August at age 89. (Uncredited / AP)
Louis Zamperini, Olympian and World War II veteran, in 2002 with his memoir, “Devil at My Heels.” Author Laura Hillenbrand’s book about him, “Unbroken,” has been adapted as a film; Zamperini died in July at 97. (Richard Hartog / Los Angeles Times)
Writer and spoken-word artist Maggie Estep died in February in Albany, N.Y., two days after having a heart attack; she was 50. (Bob Berg / Getty Images)
Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.
