About Our Reading Groups

Recent Instructors

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  Marc L. Abbott

  Marc L. Abbott

  Marc L. Abbott is a Brooklyn-native horror author. He is the co-author of Hell at Brooklyn Tea and Hell at the Way Station, the two-time African American Literary Award-winning horror anthology. His horror short stories are featured in the anthologies Blackened Roots, A Woman Unbecoming, Soul Scream, Even in the Grave, and the Bram Stoker-nominated horror anthologies New York State of Fright and Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign. He is a 2015 Moth Story Slam and Grand Slam Storyteller winner and an award-winning actor. When he is not leading reading groups for The Center for Fiction, he teaches writing to students at Dr. Izquierdo Health and Science Charter School. Find out more about him at www.whoismarclabbott.com.

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  Lily Andrews

  Lily Andrews

  Lily Andrews is a creative nonfiction writer from Minneapolis, MN. Her poetry has appeared in Ghost City Press, Sonora Review, and Ignatian Magazine. Her poem, “Speech,” was awarded Honorable Mention in the American Academy of Poets contest at Hunter College. She has written nonfiction for the Rio Grande Review, MNOpedia, the Middlebury Campus, AL.com, and most recently Cutthroat: A Journal for the Arts, where she won the Barry Lopez 2024 Nonfiction contest for an essay titled “Abortion, Alabama.” She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence and a Masters in Adolescent English Education from Hunter (CUNY). While at Sarah Lawrence, she helped to relaunch Lumina, the student literary magazine. She is at work on a coming-of-age memoir and meets with a fellow writer to discuss work-in-progress every-other week. Often closely examining the self in society in her writing, Lily is a lifelong student of gender, sexuality and feminism, and brings critical sociological lenses to her work.

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  Regina A. Bernard

  Regina A. Bernard

  Regina A. Bernard, Ph.D., was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. She is a graduating pioneer of the M.A. in African American Studies at Columbia University and also holds several other graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in Urban Education. Dr. Bernard’s research focuses on women of color and the ways of wellness. She is the author of three books on education, young women of color and feminism, and Black Studies. She has also published articles in the Journal of Pan African Studies, Small Farms Quarterly, Breathe Magazine UK, Inside Higher Education, and Audubon Magazine, among other publications.

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  Joanna Biggs

  Joanna Biggs

  Joanna Biggs is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, which was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing.

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  Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

  Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

  Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of the children’s picture book Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, illustrated by Caldecott Honor Artist Daniel Minter. Named among the best books of 2022 by NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, The Center for the Study of Multicultural Literature, and Bank Street College of Education, Blue was honored with the 2023 NCTE Orbis Pictus Award® recognizing excellence in the writing of non-fiction for children, included on the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Brew-Hammond also wrote the young adult novel Powder Necklace, which Publishers Weekly called “a winning debut”, and she edited Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices, of which Kirkus Reviews said in a starred review: “This smart, generous collection is a true gift.” Every month, Brew-Hammond co-leads a writing fellowship whose mission is to write light into darkness.

  
  

  Photo Credit: Essie Brew Hammond; EXIT (Clothing)

  
  
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  Maia Butler

  Maia Butler

  Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) is Associate Professor of African American Literature at UNC Wilmington. She is a literary geographer centering Black women writers within African Diasporic and Anglophone Postcolonial studies. She co-founded the Edwidge Danticat Society, co-edited the award-winning collection Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), and is at work on her first monograph Floating Homelands: Postnational Constructions of Home by Black Women and Nonbinary Writers, which has been supported by a Mellon fellowship in Democracy and Landscape Studies, hosted by Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard trustee.

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  Daniel Castro

  Daniel Castro

  Daniel Castro is a writer based in Mexico City. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Salon, and other publications. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has won awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Association, Cintas Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Faulkner Society. He has taught at the University of Iowa and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and is a co-founder of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

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  Martha Cooley

  Martha Cooley

  Martha Cooley is the author of three novels—The Archivist (a national bestseller published in a dozen foreign markets), Thirty-Three Swoons, and Buy Me Love—as well as a memoir, Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss. She co-translated Time Ages in a Hurry, a short-story collection by Antonio Tabucchi. A 2017 O. Henry Prize winner, Martha has published essays, short fiction, and co-translations in A Public Space, AGNI, LitHub, The Common, LARB, and other leading journals. She is a Professor Emerita at Adelphi University and taught for fifteen years in the Bennington Writing Seminars. Martha lives in the medieval Italian village of Castiglione del Terziere with her husband and about a dozen cats.

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  Hilary Davidson

  Hilary Davidson

  Hilary Davidson is an award-winning novelist and journalist. She is the author of two mystery series, one featuring amateur sleuth Lily Moore (The Damage Done, The Next One to Fall, and Evil in All Its Disguises), and the other featuring police detective Sheryn Sterling (One Small Sacrifice and Don’t Look Down). Hilary is also the author of two standalone novels (Her Last Breath and Blood Always Tells), a short-story collection (The Black Widow Club), and some fifty short stories, which have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Thuglit, Mystery Scene, Beat to a Pulp, and other publications. Her fiction has won two Anthony Awards and a Derringer Award and has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian.

  As a journalist, she is the author of 18 nonfiction books and has published work in a wide range of venues including American Archaeology, CNN, Discover, Frommer’s, Martha Stewart Weddings, and Reader’s Digest. Originally from Toronto, she has lived in New York City since October 2001.

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  Sam Dembling

  Sam Dembling

  Sam Dembling is a musician and editor in Brooklyn.

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  Helios Tavío Domínguez

  Helios Tavío Domínguez

  Born in the Canary Islands, Helios Tavío Domínguez is a Museum and Exhibition Content Designer with a deep passion for storytelling and fostering connections through culture. A New Yorker at heart and Brazilian by love, Helios embraces the richness of identity as an ever-evolving journey, shaped by experiences in dynamic cities like Madrid, New York, and São Paulo, and enriched by the unique perspective of growing up on a small island.

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  Mary Anna Evans

  Mary Anna Evans

  Mary Anna Evans is a tenured professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches courses that include mystery writing and suspense writing. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Camden and a PhD in English literature from the University of Exeter, and her research on Agatha Christie’s work has taken her to archives on both sides of the Atlantic, include the private holdings of The Christie Archive Trust. She is the co-editor of the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity, and HRF Keating Award-nominated Bloomsbury Guide to Agatha Christie. She is also the author of seventeen mystery novels, which have received recognition including the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Will Rogers Gold Medallion. Her Gothic suspense novel The Dark Library will be published in June 2025.

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  Anne Fernald

  Anne Fernald

  Anne E. Fernald is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University. She is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mrs. Dalloway and has published and edited books and articles on Virginia Woolf with special attention to feminism and intertextuality, as well as on modernism and feminism more generally. She is one of the editors of The Norton Reader and co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity 2019-23. She is currently at work on a collective biography of modernist women writers.

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  Lesley Finn

  Lesley Finn

  Lesley Finn writes and makes visual art about hauntings, history, and gender. Her prize-winning essays and short stories appear in Longreads, Sunspot Literary, Atticus Review, Calyx, and elsewhere. A former academic and medievalist, she holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.Phil in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from the University of Cambridge, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She lives in Connecticut, where she teaches at Yale University.

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  Susan Fox

  Susan Fox

  Susan Fox is a media generalist with experience in segment production at CBS News’s 60 Minutes, and program development, video-journalism, and documentary film production at Thirteen/WNET where she co-produced a three-part PBS series on the history of the American car and solo-produced a travel series pilot tracing her Guyanese roots. She has studied acting with the British American Drama Academy at Oxford, performed off-Broadway, co-hosted a parenting web-series and been both a story and copy editor for a Brooklyn neighborhood broadsheet. Susan’s writing includes articles about her family’s traumatic experience with September 11th, women mothering through menopause during the pandemic, and Black women playwrights. Passionate about both fiction and non-fiction, she cherishes reading in community and is known to serially devour texts to slide into scheduled book groups for the joy of learning and sharing insights with fellow readers. She has a B.A. in History from Yale University and a Certificate in Journalism from New York University.

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  Zack Graham

  Zack Graham

  Zack Graham’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in the New York Times, The Nation, Rolling Stone, GQ, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. He is the editor of a magazine called Lampblack that publishes Black writers from around the world, and serves on the Advisory Council of Kismet, a new literary magazine offering a fresh perspective on spirituality, religion, and mysticism. He grew up in Chicago and lives in New York City.

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  Sheridan Hay

  Sheridan Hay

  Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), which features a lost novel by Herman Melville, was a BookSense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries. An historical novel, Unfolded, will be published in 2024. Sheridan has led The Center’s Moby-Dick reading group many times, as well as leading a popular Henry James group, and most recently, a group dedicated to the work of Shirley Hazzard.

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  Amanda Hollander

  Amanda Hollander

  A writer and opera librettist, Amanda Hollander holds a doctorate in Victorian and children’s literature from UCLA. She recently completed a fellowship with the American Opera Project. She has published several works of speculative short fiction and academic articles. You can find more about her upcoming projects at amandahollander.com.

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  Chris Holmes

  Chris Holmes

  Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the creator and host of the literary podcast Burned by Books. He is also the co-producer and host of Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society for Novel Studies. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature is published with Bloomsbury. Since 2011 he has been the co-organizer of the New Voices Literary Festival at Ithaca College.

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  Elizabeth Howard

  Elizabeth Howard

  Elizabeth Howard grew up with a passion for books and reading. Her articles have appeared in Corporate Board Member, Communication Arts, European Communications, Investor Relations, Law Firm Marketing & Profit Report, Communication World, the Strategist, and the New York Law Journal, among others. Queen Anne’s Lace and Wild Blackberry Pie, a book of reflections on growing up in New Hampshire, was published by Thornwillow Press in 2011. Her other books include A Day with Bonefish Joe (David R. Godin, 2015) and she edited Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back (Easton Studio Press, 2016). She was the inaugural Madeleine L’Engle Fellow at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

  She is the producer and host of a podcast, the Short Fuse, that can be found on Spotify, Amazon Music, Simplecast and through the Arts Fuse, the online journal of criticism and commentary. Through the Short Fuse, she is often in conversations with authors.

  Elizabeth Howard lives in New York City.

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  Naomi Huffman

  Naomi Huffman

  Naomi Huffman is a co-founder of Hagfish, an editorial studio and small press based in Brooklyn.

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  Evan James

  Evan James

  Evan James is the author of Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe: A Novel and I’ve Been Wrong Before: Essays. He has an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at The University of Iowa, Victoria University of Wellington, The Berlin Writers’ Workshop, The New School, and elsewhere. He ran a Tristram Shandy reading group for The Center for Fiction in the spring of 2022. He lives in Brooklyn.

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  Kristopher Jansma

  Kristopher Jansma

  Kristopher Jansma is the author of Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers, and the novels Our Narrow Hiding Places, Why We Came to the City, and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. He is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction, distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016, has been published in The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Kristopher is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at SUNY New Paltz College.

  
  

  Photo Credit: Michael Levy

  
  
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  Dr. Anastasia Klimchynskaya

  Dr. Anastasia Klimchynskaya

  Dr. Anastasia Klimchynskaya is a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, with a particular interest in the intersections of science and literature, and an instructor at Loyola University Chicago. She has taught, published, and presented widely on science fiction, detective fiction, and the history of science, including appearing as a recurring co-host on the Rosenbach Museum’s virtual series Sundays with Frankenstein and Sherlock Mondays. She has also previously taught a Decolonizing Science Fiction and Fantasy reading group at The Center for Fiction.

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  Sheila Kohler

  Sheila Kohler

  Sheila Kohler is the author of ten novels, three volumes of short fiction, a memoir, and many essays. Her most recent novel is Open Secrets (Penguin, 2020). Her memoir, Once We Were Sisters was published by Penguin in 2017, as well as Canongate in the U.K. and Alba in Spain. She has won numerous prizes, including the O.Henry twice, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories, most recently in The Best American Mystery Stories 2020. Her work has been published in thirteen countries. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington and at Princeton since 2007. Her novel, Cracks was made into a film with directors Jordan and Ridley Scott with Eva Green playing Miss G. You can find her blog at Psychology Today under Dreaming for Freud.

  
  

  Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

  
  
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  Lee Konstantinou

  Lee Konstantinou

  Lee Konstantinou is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/HarperCollins 2009) and the literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Harvard 2016). He co-edited The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa 2012) and Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). In 2022 he published The Last Samurai Reread (Columbia), and he’s working on a new project on creator-owned comics.

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  Dennis Krieger

  Dennis Krieger

  Dennis Krieger is a Manhattan attorney with a lifetime of involvement in literature. During college and law school at Berkeley, Dennis was a Teaching Assistant in various literature courses. Later, he was the co-author of Skiing the Best, a Guide to Skiing in North America (Vintage) which became a bestseller and was a main Book of the Month selection (Quality Book Club). Dennis is an avid reader of Graham Greene as well as British fiction between-the wars generally. A Proustian, Dennis has spent the last decade participating in the Center’s intensive Proust Groups as well as in the study of Proust at other institutions.

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  Mike Levine

  Mike Levine

  Mike Levine is an independent editor. He was previously an acquisitions editor at Northwestern University Press. Among the authors he published were Jen Beagin (Whiting Award winner), A. E. Stallings (National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, finalist), and Stephen Karam (Pulitzer Prize in Drama, finalist). He has also been a senior editor at the Great Books Foundation. Since 2000, he has taught literature and film seminars in several continuing education programs. He has a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in English from Rice University.

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  Julia Lichtblau

  Julia Lichtblau

  Julia Lichtblau writes fiction, essays, and criticism in Brooklyn. Her interest in Francophone African literature goes back to her teens living in Côte d’Ivoire, where her father was a U.S. diplomat, and she attended the Lycée Sainte-Marie de Cocody, the Ivoirian girls school. (For other writing on West African literature and related personal essays and fiction, see www.juliamlichtblau.com.) After a journalism career covering international finance at BusinessWeek and Dow Jones Newswires in New York and Paris, she earned an MFA in fiction from Bennington College. She was a member of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Writers’ Institute in 2023-24. She was book review editor for The Common for seven years. An excerpt of her novel, The Glass House, set in Washington, DC and Côte d’Ivoire, was a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s Winter 2024 Contest. The first chapter was longlisted for the 2023 Disquiet Prize. Her essay “I So Wish You Remembered” was published in the Spring 2024 issue of The American Scholar, her third for the magazine. Her fiction, criticism, and essays have also appeared in the Museum of Americana, American Fiction, Blackbird, Narrative, the Florida Review, the Common, and elsewhere.

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  Matilda Lin Berke

  Matilda Lin Berke

  Matilda Lin Berke is from Los Angeles. Now she lives in New York. She writes theory for Spike art magazine; you can find her short fiction and poetry in various places. She is working on a collection of machine essays; a novel, Industry Plant; and “Girlblogging,” a column at Filmmaker magazine.

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  Jeanna Lucci Canapari

  Jeanna Lucci Canapari

  Jeanna Lucci Canapari is freelance writer and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King’s College (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She is working on a memoir centered on the intersection of truth and mythology in an Italian immigrant family. Her freelance work appears mainly in Yale University publications, and her personal essays have appeared in Salon, Creative Nonfiction, Allegory Ridge, and Off Assignment. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University and though she currently lives in New Haven, she is a former and forever Brooklynite. She previously led a course at The Center for Fiction on Madeline Miller’s novel Circe.

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  Kannan Mahadevan

  Kannan Mahadevan

  Kannan Mahadevan is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned an MFA in Fiction. He has taught creative writing workshops at Drew University and the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and led reading groups on Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain for The Center for Fiction.

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  Katherine Montwieler

  Katherine Montwieler

  Katherine Montwieler chairs the Theatre Department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. A professor of English and Gender Studies, she previously led a reading group at The Center for Fiction on the work of Elizabeth Strout. She has published on nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction.

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  William Mottolese

  William Mottolese

  William Mottolese has taught at Fordham University and Saint Joseph’s College in Indiana and is presently Co-Chair of the English Department at Sacred Heart Greenwich. He has published on such subjects as Olaudah Equiano, Laurence Sterne, and James Joyce and is presently at work on projects on Joyce, teaching critical thinking, and the relation of literary modernism to twentieth-century popular music. He has taught for a decade on the faculty of the Center for Fiction where he has led classes on James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, Irish literature, and postcolonial literature. William is an award-winning teacher, published poet, and proud father of three children.

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  Morley Musick

  Morley Musick

  Morley Musick is the editor in chief of Mouse Magazine and writes a city life column for N+1.

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  Pam Newton

  Pam Newton

  Pam Newton teaches writing in the English department at Yale University and is a freelance magazine writer. Her articles, mostly personal essays and art/culture journalism, have appeared in the New York Times magazine, Time Out New York, the Huffington Post, American Theatre, the National Book Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. She has taught writing and literature for many years to a wide range of ages, including a decade teaching in the Humanities faculty at Cooper Union and directing the Writing Fellows program there. She has a B.A. in Drama from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English Literature from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.

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  Han Ong

  Han Ong

  Han Ong’s stories can be found in the New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Conjunctions, among other publications. He is a MacArthur Fellow.

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  Donna Raskin

  Donna Raskin

  Donna Raskin is the senior health and fitness editor at Runner’s World and Bicycling. She has taught literature and writing at The College of New Jersey, and has run many book groups with The Center for Fiction because her favorite thing to do is discuss novels.

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  Julia Ringo

  Julia Ringo

  Julia Ringo is a co-founder of Hagfish, an editorial studio and small press based in Brooklyn.

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  Carl Rollyson

  Carl Rollyson

  Carl Rollyson is the author of Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner, William Faulkner Day by Day, and a two-volume biography: The Life of William Faulkner.

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  Antonio Romani

  Antonio Romani

  Antonio Romani, an essayist and translator, is the author of La Paziente Attesa delle Pietre (Pacini Fazzi, 2023). His writings and co-translations have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, the Common, Tin House, the Southampton Review, and other literary journals. His essay on Elena Ferrante was cited as Notable in The Best American Essays 2016. He co-translated (with Martha Cooley) Antonio Tabucchi’s Time Ages in a Hurry in 2015. Since 2014, he has led a “What’s Italian?” reading group at The Center.

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  Rebecca Rukeyser

  Rebecca Rukeyser

  Rebecca Rukeyser is the author of the novel The Seaplane on Final Approach (2022; Doubleday USA/ Granta Books UK). Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Believer, Granta, The Guardian, and Zyzzyva, among others, and was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Davis, California, Rebecca lives in Germany, where she teaches creative writing at Bard College Berlin.

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  Samuel Rutter

  Samuel Rutter

  Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia. His work can be found in Harper’s, the White Review, the Paris Review, and ARTNews, and he is a regular contributor to T magazine. He was the deputy editor of Astra magazine.

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  Joy Sanchez-Taylor

  Joy Sanchez-Taylor

  Joy Sanchez-Taylor is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) and a Mellon/ACLU Community College Fellow whose research specialty is intersections between science fiction, fantasy, and critical race studies. Her book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color (2021) examines the contributions of late twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S. and Canadian science fiction authors of color to the genre. For more of her writing, check out her article “The Line Between Science Fiction and Fantasy is Blurring, and I’m Into It,” which is nominated for an IGNYTE Award.

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  Lise Schreier

  Lise Schreier

  Dr. Lise-Ségolène Schreier is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. Her publications have drawn on diverse material such as feminist newspapers, medical travelogues, fashion plates, colonial-era children’s literature, vaudeville theater and early comics. At Fordham, she teaches courses on the nineteenth-century French novel, francophone literature and contemporary fiction writing.

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  Jennifer Stock

  Jennifer Stock

  Jennifer Stock is a writer whose work has appeared in the Iowa Review, the Yale Review, the New England Review, the Georgia Review, and others. Her essays “Alice and Jean,” “Lighter than Air” and “Parrot on a Stone Plinth” were awarded Notable distinctions in the Best American Essays of 2019, 2021, and 2023. Her debut essay collection, Object Lessons, was a finalist for the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize in 2024, and she was the recipient of the 2019 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. She holds a B.A. in English and Music from Yale and a Ph.D in Music Composition from the City University of New York. She is currently a Lecturer in Writing at Yale.

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  Art Taylor

  Art Taylor

  Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two short story collections: The Adventure of the Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions and The Boy Detective and the Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense. He has written frequently on Stanley Ellin’s short fiction and has taught Ellin’s stories at George Mason University, where he is a professor of English and Creative Writing.

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  Miriam Tuliao

  Miriam Tuliao

  Miriam Tuliao is a New York Public Library veteran, an adjunct library science lecturer, and a senior marketing manager at Penguin Random House. She is a member of Women’s Media Group and the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association.

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  Shirley Tung

  Shirley Tung

  Shirley F. Tung is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University, specializing in the literature and culture of the Restoration and long eighteenth century. She is also a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Life-Writing. Dr. Tung’s scholarly work, which spans the genres of (auto)biography, epic and lyric poetry, early periodicals and print media, and travel writing, has been published in several top-tier academic journals such as European Romantic Review, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. At Kansas State, she teaches courses that range from medieval to modernist literature as well as classes on film and television. Her teaching has received the awards at the international, national, and collegiate levels from the British and American Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Kansas State’s College of Arts and Sciences, and the Student Association of Graduates in English. Currently, Dr. Tung is completing two books: a micro-biography on John Milton’s time as a pamphleteer during the English Civil War and a braided biography of three influential eighteenth-century women travel writers.

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  Thais Vitorelli

  Thais Vitorelli

  Thais Vitorelli is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and educator from São Paulo, Brazil. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from The New School, and sometimes experiments with poetry and autofiction. Her stories have been featured in The Inquisitive Eater, Share Literary Journal, Pitch Wars, and Coca-Cola Refreshing Films.

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  Brad Vogel

  Brad Vogel

  Brad Vogel is the author of the books Find Me in the Feral Pockets (featured in the New Yorker in spring 2024) and Broad Meadow Bird. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and a variety of journals. A graduate of Tulane Law School, he is a writer, creative producer, guide, and historian. He previously served as executive director of the New York Preservation Archive Project, a fellow with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in post-Katrina New Orleans, and captain of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. His community activism extends to civic battles over Penn Station redesign, the Gowanus rezoning, urban forestry, Blue Highways waterborne freight systems, and public waterfront access.

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  Benje Williams

  Benje Williams

  Benje Williams grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the grandson of Southern sharecroppers and farmers.

  He studied business and African-American history at UC Berkeley before working as a consultant in New York, Kenya, South Africa, India, and Pakistan. He completed an MBA from Stanford and moved back to Pakistan to set up an education venture called Amal Academy.

  He ran Amal for seven years in Lahore and transitioned back to New York, where he co-founded Understory, a non-profit focused on forest restoration, and Outlandish, a hiking brand helping people reconnect with nature.

  He’s a Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication and has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Longreads, Backpacker, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. He’s working on his first novel and is represented by Mina Hamedi (Janklow & Nesbit).

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  Lauren Yanks

  Lauren Yanks

  Lauren Yanks has a Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from NYU and a Master of Divinity from Yale University. She has been a literature and writing professor for over 20 years and has published hundreds of articles and journals on a wide variety of topics.

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  Lila Azam Zanganeh

  Lila Azam Zanganeh

  Lila Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature and cinema at Harvard University. She has contributed criticism, interviews and essays to a host of publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Le Monde, La Repubblica, and the Paris Review. Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, was the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize and was published worldwide in thirteen languages. Lila serves as a Director on the Board of Trustees for the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation and as a member of the Advisory Board of Libraries Without Border. She has also served as a judge for the Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Her forthcoming novel, Exit Paradise, will be published in 2025.