(CortacaToday) — Upstate New York has been called home by many notable people, and our own Tompkins and Cortland counties are no different. Here is a list of five local authors you should know about:

Carl Sagan: 

A truly famous resident of Ithaca, Carl Sagan was born in New York City in 1934. He would not move upstate until he got a job as an astronomy professor at Cornell University. Sagan wrote many books during his life, including The Dragons of Eden, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Beyond his work as a professor and author, he also wrote the 1980s show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Further cementing his deep connection to the local region is the Sagan Planet Walk, produced as a partnership between Cornell and the Ithaca Sciencenter and named in honor of Carl Sagan’s contributions to the study of space. He is buried in Ithaca at the Lakeview Cemetary.

Alexandra Illmer Forsythe:

Computer science is a field with a large gender imbalance, with only about 20% of undergraduate computer scientists being women as of 2018. However, one of the first female computer scientists was Alexandra Illmer Forsythe, born in Massachusetts and raised in Cortland. She would marry math professor George Forsythe, who created the department of computer science at Standford University, but she was also a major contributor to early development in the field. Beyond helping her husband create the new Stanford department, she wrote and published the first computer science textbooks, as well as helped to create teaching methodologies to be used in schools. She passed away eight years after her husband in 1980.

Diksha Basu:

Born in New Dehli, India, Diksha Basu moved to Ithaca as a teenager and graduated from Cornell University. Author of three novels, her first book, Opening Night, deals with a woman from New York who moves to Mumbai to become a Bollywood actress and clearly draws inspiration from her own experiences. Her third book, Destination Wedding, also stars a protagonist from the US who makes frequent trips to India, just as Basu did when she was growing up in Ithaca. She now resides in Brooklyn with her husband and child.

Carl Carmer:

Carl Carmer was born in Cortland in 1893. Highly influenced by his youth in upstate New York, Carmer wrote multiple books inspired by the region. Upon his death in 1976, he was given the title of “Historian of Upstate New York” by the New York Times. In the same article it is explained how Carmer would refer to New York as “York state, the state without New York City”. Ironically perhaps his most famous work is Stars Fell on Alabama, a book about his time in Alabama, published in 1934.

Alex Haley:

Another born and raised upstate New York resident, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca and moved back to the town at five years old. Best known for writing Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976, a book which would later become a television miniseries on ABC. Roots would become a culturally important book in the United States and helped make Haley into the best selling African American writer in the United States. Haley also wrote many other books, the first of which was The Autobiography of Malcom X in 1965. Alex Haley died in 1992 at 70 years old, but the impact of his work remains to this day.