Brigham Young University

Jonathan Joseph "Jon" Heder is an American actor, filmmaker and screenwriter. He is best known for playing the title character of the 2004 comedy... film Napoleon Dynamite. He has also acted in the films The Benchwarmers, School for Scoundrels, Blades of Glory, Mama's Boy, and When in Rome, and provided voice talents in the animated films Monster House and Surf's Up. Heder was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, and is one of six children of family practice physician Dr. James Heder and his wife Helen. His paternal grandparents, Swedish immigrants, changed the family surname from "Olafsen" to "Heder". Heder has an identical twin brother, Dan, as well as an older sister and brother, Rachel and Doug, and two younger brothers, Adam and Matt. Heder is the nephew by marriage of former NFL running back and current WCAU sportscaster, Vai Sikahema. Heder attended Walker Middle School in Salem, Oregon, and graduated from South Salem High School in 1996, where he was on the swim team and was a member of the Drama Association. Heder is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served an LDS mission in Japan, for which he learned to speak Japanese.
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Orson Scott Card is an American author, critic, public speaker and conservative political activist. He writes in several genres, but is primarily... known for his science fiction. His novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the only author to win both of American science fiction's top prizes in consecutive years. He is also known as a political commentator and for his outspoken advocacy for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Card is descended from Charles Ora Card and Brigham Young. Card was born in Richland, Washington, and was raised in Santa Clara, California as well as Mesa, Arizona and Orem, Utah. He served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil and graduated from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah; he also spent a year in a Ph.D. program at the University of Notre Dame. Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, an environment that has played a significant role in Ender's Game and many of his other works. Card began his writing career primarily as a poet, studying with Clinton F. Larson at Brigham Young University.
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Brandon Sanderson is an American fantasy author. A Nebraska native, he currently resides in American Fork, Utah. He earned his Master's degree in... Creative Writing in 2005 from Brigham Young University, where he was on the staff of Leading Edge, a semi-professional speculative fiction magazine published by the university. He was a college roommate of Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. He has been nominated twice for the John W. Campbell Award. Sanderson was married on July 7, 2006 and is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After Robert Jordan's death, Brandon Sanderson was selected by Harriet McDougal , to complete the final book in Jordan's epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Harriet asked him to complete the series after being deeply impressed by Mistborn: The Final Empire. Tor Books made the announcement December 7, 2007. On March 30, 2009 it was announced that A Memory of Light, originally slated to be the final book in the Wheel of Time series, will be split into three volumes.
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Aaron Edward Eckhart is an American film and stage actor. Born in California, he moved to England at the age of 13 when his father relocated the... family. Several years later, he began his acting career performing in school plays before moving to Sydney, Australia, for his high school senior year. He left high school without graduating, but earned a diploma through an adult education course. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1994, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film. For much of the mid-1990s, he lived in New York City as a struggling, unemployed actor. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young, Eckhart met director and writer Neil LaBute who cast him in several of LaBute's original plays. Five years later, Eckhart made a debut as an unctuous sociopathic ladies' man in LaBute's black comedy film In the Company of Men . Under LaBute's guidance, he worked in the director's films Your Friends & Neighbors , Nurse Betty , and Possession .
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Jim Weaver McKown Barnes is a Native American author born near Summerfield, Oklahoma and is of Choctaw and Welsh heritage. He received his BA from... Southeastern State College in Durant, OK in 1964 and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas. He taught at Truman State University from 1970 to 2003, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature and Writer-in-Residence. After retiring from Truman State, he was Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Brigham Young University until 2006. On January 15, 2009, Barnes was named Oklahoma poet laureate for 2009-2010. Barnes is the founding editor of the Chariton Review Press and editor of The Chariton Review. He is also a contributing editor to the Pushcart Prize. He has published over 500 poems in more than 100 journals, as well as numerous translations. He has sat on several National Endowment for the Arts committees and is presently Poetry Editor for the Truman State University Press. Barnes has given readings of his work at many college and university campuses, and his work is widely anthologized.
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Dean Hughes is a prominent author of historical novels and children's books. Dean Hughes was born in Ogden, Utah in 1943. He started telling people... in junior high that he was going to be a writer, but he did not become serious until he took a creative writing class in high school. During his senior year in high school he started his first novel. He attended Weber State University studying English, and received a Masters in creative writing and a PhD in literature from the University of Washington. Before he became a full-time writer, he taught English at Central Missouri State University for 8 years. Hughes has also taught creative writing at Brigham Young University. Hughes was 35 when his first book was published. He has written and published over ninety books. Much of his writing is targeted to children and young adults , although he is also well known to adult readers of LDS Fiction for "Children of the Promise" and "Hearts of the Children" series, set in World War II and Vietnam War eras respectively. He is one of the writers largely credited with the rapidly increasing quality of Mormon literature in recent years.
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Brian Evenson is an American academic and writer of both literary fiction and popular fiction. He has received degrees from Brigham Young University... and the University of Washington . After leaving a teaching position at BYU, he held positions at Oklahoma State University, Syracuse University and University of Denver. He is currently the Chair of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. He is also a senior editor of the Conjunctions literary journal published by Bard College and has participated in Naropa University's Summer Writing Program and The Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. Formerly a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , Evenson left both the Church and a teaching position at Brigham Young University following controversy surrounding his first book, Altmann's Tongue. Evenson is a prolific writer of short stories, novellas, and novels. He has also translated several works of literature from French into English.
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