Alex Carp is a research editor at the New York Times Magazine. His reporting and essays have appeared there as well as in The New Yorker, New York magazine, and the New York Review of Books.

Mark Chait, formerly an executive editor at HarperCollins and a senior editor at Penguin, is now a founding member of a burgeoning publishing startup Scribe. A Seattle native, he has lived in Brooklyn for more than 20 years.

Laura Sinagra Dolan is a member of the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council and Nonfiction Programming Committee. A public affairs and strategic communications executive, she served as communications director for the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office during the festival’s early days. As a music and film critic, her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.

After earning her master’s degrees in Children’s Literature and English Literature from Simmons College in Boston, Emily joined the editorial team at Roaring Brook Press. She works mostly with picture book, middle grade, nonfiction, and graphic novels. She edited Elisha Cooper’s Caldecott-Honor winning Big Cat, Little Cat, Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann’s groundbreaking graphic novel Go With the Flow, Jessica Lanan’s Sibert-Honor winning Jumper: A Day in the Life of a Backyard Jumping Spider, and Ann Bausum’s White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War Then Rewrote the History, which received seven starred reviews was awarded the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Honor. She loves living in Brooklyn.

Novella Ford is the Associate Director of Public Programs and Exhibitions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research division of The New York Public Library.  In her role, she has launched the annual Schomburg Center Literary Festival and has organized hundreds of public programs at the intersection of scholarship and popular culture. She connects diverse audiences to the archives and engages history through dialogue, performance, literature, and visual arts. Most recently she served as the guest editor of Pen + Brush Gallery’s literary magazine, In Print No. 5 and serves on the board of Cave Canem Foundation, a home for the many voices of Black poetry.

Mary Gannon is the Executive Director of The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), a 55-year-old nonprofit service organization that supports independent literary publishers. Gannon is a veteran nonprofit administrator with more than twenty years of experience in the literary field. Prior to joining CLMP, she was the Associate Director/Director of Content for the Academy of American Poets, where she oversaw the award-winning website Poets.org, the popular Poem-a-Day series, American Poets magazine, and the Academy’s Education Program. She also served as Editorial Director of Poets & Writers, Inc., where she headed up Poets & Writers Magazine and pw.org. An award-winning poet, Gannon has published numerous articles about publishing and the literary field, profiling such notable authors as Anne Carson, John Haskell, Major Jackson, Heidi Julavits, Jay McInerney, and David Remnick. She is co-author with her husband, Kevin Larimer, of The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer, published by Avid Reader Press in 2020

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian/U.S. writer born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Ohio and South Carolina. She is a 2026 Hawthornden fellow in fiction, a 2024 Civitella Ranieri nonfiction fellow,  a Bread Loaf 2021 Katherine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, and a Cave Canem poetry fellow. Her memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House), won the 2023 PEN Open Book Award, and a  2023 Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction from Lambda Literary, and was a New Yorker Magazine Best Book, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, an Amazon’s Best of the Month Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American (Wesleyan), nominated for a NAACP Image Award, finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and longlisted for a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. She is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Natalie Green is the Director of Programs & Partnerships at the National Book Foundation. Before joining the Foundation, Natalie was the Manager of Los Angeles Programs at PEN America. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from UCLA, is co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival Bookends committee, and organizes with North Brooklyn Mutual Aid.

Jess Harwick is a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. First and foremost a children’s librarian, she also is the chair of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, which awards one fiction and one non-fiction book annually for “capturing the spirit of Brooklyn.” She is also a project leader for BookMatch, BPL’s online reader’s advisory service, and the co-chair of the Children’s Day committee for Brooklyn Book Festival

Donna Hill began her career in 1987 writing short stories for the confession magazines. Since that time she has more than 100 published titles to her credit since her first novel was released in 1990, and is considered one of the early pioneers of the African American romance genre.Three of her novels have been adapted for television. She has been featured in Essence, the New York Daily News, USA Today, Today’s Black Woman, and Black Enterprise among many others. She has received numerous awards for her body of work—which cross several genres– including The Career Achievement Award, the first recipient of The Trailblazer Award, The Zora Neale Hurston Literary Award, The Gold Pen Award among others, as well as commendations for her community service. As an editor she has packaged several highly successful novels, and anthologies, two of which were nominated for awards. Donna is a graduate of Goddard College with an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently in pursuit of her Doctor of Arts in English Pedagogy and Technology. She is an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at Medgar Evers College and lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her family. Her most recent novel Confessions In B-Flat, received a Starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and is being adapted for the screen by Amblin Partners and executive produced by Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer. Her latest novel is I Am Ayah—The Way Home, which also received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and compared to elements in Octavia Butler’s Kindred by Kirkus Reviews. She can be found at donnaohill.com

Joan Hilty is Executive Editor at Nickelodeon Animation/Avatar Studios. She previously directed comics and graphic novel licensed publishing at ViacomCBS Consumer Products, and is a founder of the book producer Pageturner. She was a longtime editor for DC Comics/Vertigo and a syndicated cartoonist. She co-directs comics programming for Miami Book Fair and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City

Mabel Hsu is an Editorial Director at Stonefruit Studio, a children’s and YA imprint at Sourcebooks.

Lisa Lucas was the Senior Vice President and Publisher of Pantheon & Schocken Books at Penguin Random House. Formerly, she served as the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation and the Publisher of Guernica Magazine.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the author of The Life Assignment; the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Colaterales/Collateral; and coeditor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019). He served as President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets and codirector of 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center. He is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, CantoMundo, Queer|Art|Mentorship, and the T. S. Eliot and Hawthornden foundations.

Greg Mania is a writer whose words have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, HuffPost, and elsewhere. He is the author of the celebrated debut memoir, Born to Be Public, which was named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, among others. He lives in Los Angeles, where he co-hosts Empty Trash, a bi-monthly reading series. He is currently working on his debut novel.

Melanie McNair has served as Senior Director of Public Programming at the Center for Fiction since its opening in its new home in Brooklyn, curating events celebrating storytelling across genres and showcasing the talents of authors, artists, actors, musicians, journalists, and change-makers worldwide.

Paul W. Morris is the Publisher and Executive Director of Lapham’s Quarterly and Director of Special Projects at Harper’s Magazine. In addition, he serves as Interim Executive Director of the Salmagundi Club. Formerly, he was Director of Literary Programs at PEN America, Vice President of The Authors Guild, and Executive Director of House of SpeakEasy Foundation. He has held editorial positions at various publishers including Viking Penguin and Entertainment Weekly, and from 2004 to 2011, he oversaw digital strategy, cultural programming, and marketing at BOMB Magazine, where he was General Manager. His writing has appeared in several anthologies, and his essay on Hermann Hesse was included as the introduction to a translation of Siddhartha. He sits on advisory councils for the National Book Foundation and the Brooklyn Book Festival. He lives in New York City.

Born in Santiago, Chile and raised in New England, Lily Philpott is an indigenous transracial adoptee. She has worked for close to a decade in the arts and culture nonprofit sector in New York City at PEN America, the Guggenheim Museum, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is currently working as Events Manager at the Catapult Book Group. She is a member of the Starlings Collective, a group supporting BIPOC adoptee writers; the International Literature Committee at the Brooklyn Book Festival; and she volunteers as the Director of Programs at the nonprofit organization Singapore Unbound. She graduated with an MFA in Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and her work can be found in Apogee and Narrative Magazine.

Emma Raddatz is an Editor and Development Associate at Archipelago Books, and the Director of its children’s imprint, Elsewhere Editions. She joined the press six years ago and has been selected to participate in editors’ fellowships in Montreal, Iceland, India, Seoul, Istanbul, Frankfurt, and Bologna. She’s on the Independent Publishers Caucus Steering Committee. She lives in Brooklyn.

Camille Rankine is the author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses, published by Copper Canyon Press, and the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship. She is the recipient of a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. She is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf has served as PEN America’s senior director of literary programs since September 2015. She oversees curation, production, audience building, and strategy for a range of programs and initiatives honoring literary excellence, lifting writers whose voices need to be heard, and curating public programs featuring American and international authors and artists. Formerly, as the manager of public programs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, she produced a year-round schedule of panel discussions, performances, film screening, and symposia spanning the history and culture of the global Black experience. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and an MA in English Civilization from the University of the French West Indies.

Johnny Temple is the publisher and editor in chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. He won the 2013 Ellery Queen Award and is the editor of the anthology USA Noir, which was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Temple has taught courses on the publishing business at Wilkes University, Wesleyan University, and Pratt Institute. He also plays bass guitar in the bands Girls Against Boys, Soulside, and Fake Names, which have toured extensively across the globe and released numerous albums on independent and major record companies. He has contributed articles and political essays to various publications, including The Nation, Publishers Weekly, AlterNet, Poets & Writers, and BookForum.

Jafreen Uddin is Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, a national literary nonprofit dedicated to amplifying Asian and Asian diasporic storytelling. She is the first woman to lead the organization since its founding in 1991. She previously served as Deputy Director of Development for Special Events at PEN America and as Events Manager with the Brennan Center for Justice. Jafreen regularly supports and volunteers her time with a number of arts and social change organizations, and is currently Chair of the Adult Internship Grant Committee for We Need Diverse Books.

Meredith Walters is the Brooklyn Public Library’s Assistant Vice President of Arts and Culture.

In the past fifteen years freelance editor Camilla Zhang has worked at Marvel, DC Comics, and Z2 Comics, among others. While she is most known for her contributions as Kickstarter’s former Comics Outreach Lead, she is also a prose and comics writer. Her stories have been published by Entropy Magazine, Top Cow Comics, and Crossed Genres. She was born and raised in New York City and is a VONA 2017 alum who studied under acclaimed comics and genre fiction writer Marjorie Liu. Camilla is driven by the desire to make the world a more empathetic and compassionate place. She is represented by Cecilia Lyra of P.S. Literary.