Rumaan Alam (Chair) is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty; That Kind of Mother; Leave the World Behind, a Finalist for the National Book Award; and Entitlement. (Photo credit: David A. Land)

Debra Magpie Earling is the author of the novels Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. She is the recipient of the Montana Governor’s Arts Award and has received both a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the American Book Award. Her novel Perma Red was recognized by The Atlantic as one of the Great American Novels. She is a citizen of the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes. (Photo credit: Alexis Joy Hagestad)

Attica Locke is a New York Times bestselling author of six books, including Guide Me Home, the conclusion of the Edgar Allen Poe Award–winning Bluebird, Bluebird trilogy; Black Water Rising, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and Pleasantville, which won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. She is also a writer and producer of television, working on such series as Little Fires Everywhere and From Scratch, for which she was co-creator and showrunner. (Photo credit: Victoria Will)

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books, including the National Book Award Longlisted Thunderstruck & Other Stories and The Souvenir Museum, and the National Book Award Finalist The Giant’s House. She has received grants and honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Photo credit: Edward Carey)

Cody Morrison is from Jackson, Mississippi. He began his career in bookselling in 1993 when he started working at Square Books. He is the adult book buyer for the store and lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his wife and two daughters. (Photo credit: Bruce Newman)

Heather Kathleen Moody Hall is an Indigenous poet, activist, and proprietor of Green Feather Book Company from Norman, Oklahoma. She has been an enthusiastic opponent of book banning and has spoken at national and international gatherings on the role of the independent bookstore in the fight for freedom to read. She serves on the boards of Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, Norman Cultural Connection, and is an active member of the American Booksellers Association. (Photo credit: Shevaun Williams)

Tiya Miles (Chair) is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories, a prize-winning novel, and the recent biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her 2021 National Book Award Winner, All That She Carried, was a New York Times bestseller awarded 11 historical and literary prizes. Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University and the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Mellon Foundations. (Photo credit: Stephanie Mitchell)

Raj Patel is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and academic. He is a research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. (Photo credit: Texas Connect, Leila Saidane)

Cristina Rivera Garza is an author, translator, and critic. Her recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir and Finalist for the National Book Award; El invencible verano de Liliana, which received the Xavier Villaurrutia National Award; Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, translated by Sarah Booker, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; and The Taiga Syndrome, translated by Aviva Kana and Suzanne Jill Levine, which received a Shirley Jackson Award. A recipient of the MacArthur fellowship, she is Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies. (Photo credit: Juan Rodrigo Llaguno)

Eli Saslow is a writer-at-large for the New York Times. He is a 2023 and a 2014 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013, 2016, and 2017. He has published three books, including the bestselling Rising Out of Hatred, which won the 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a Writers Guild of America screenwriter, and the co-writer for Four Good Days, which was nominated for an Academy Award. (Photo credit: Joanna Ceciliani)

Kate Daniels is the author of six poetry collections, a memoir of poetry and psychoanalysis, and editor of Muriel Rukeyser’s selected poems, Out of Silence. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is the Edwin Mims Professor of English Emerita at Vanderbilt University, and now teaches writing in the New Directions program of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She has particular interests in the health humanities, working with people in addiction recovery and living with cancer. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo credit: Bonnie Ertelt)

Terrance Hayes’s (Chair) recent publications include So to Speak, a collection of poems, and Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry, a collection of visual and lyric essays. His honors include the National Book Award for Poetry, the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. He is a distinguished Silver Professor at New York University. (Photo credit: Dirk Skiba)

H. Melt is the author of There Are Trans People Here, which won the Heartland Booksellers Award. They edited the anthology Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. H. Melt attended the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat, the Tin House Workshop, and was an artist-in-residence at the Newberry Library, researching the Chicago Protest Collection. They are currently the Poetry Coordinator at Women & Children First, Chicago’s oldest feminist bookstore. (Photo credit: Mercedes Zapata)

Anis Mojgani is the author of six poetry collections, the libretto of the opera Sanctuaries, and a forthcoming children’s picture book. He served two terms as Oregon’s 10^th Poet Laureate and is co-creator of the Oregon Telephone Poetry Hotline. His most recent collection is The Tigers, They Let Me. Originally from New Orleans, Mojgani currently resides in Portland, Oregon. (Photo credit: Anis Mojgani)

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County. She is the author of Tortillera, winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize, and Visionware, as well as the editor of Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing. She is the Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day and The Betsy Writer’s Room Poetry-Curator-At-Large. (Photo credit: O, Miami)

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Stesha Brandon (Chair) is a long-time advocate for the literary arts. She is now the Literature and Humanities Program Manager at The Seattle Public Library after overseeing programming for many years at University Book Store and Town Hall Seattle. She currently volunteers as the Program Manager and UNESCO Focal Point at Seattle City of Literature and serves on the board of Seattle Arts & Lectures. (Photo Credit: S. Brandon)

Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón is the author of the novels Los días hábiles, Dicen que los dormidos, and Palacio, as well as the story collection Preciosos perdedores. He is also a translator and the Irvin E Houck Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College. (Photo credit: Tanya Rosen-Jones)

Bill Johnston received the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry for his rendering of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic narrative poem in rhyming couplets Pan Tadeusz. He translates from Polish and French; his recent translations have included work by Julia Fiedorczuk, Wiesław Myśliwski, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, and Jeanne Benameur. His other honors include the PEN Translation Prize, the Best Translated Book Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University. (Photo credit: Isabelle Darcy)

Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire. Her writings have been translated into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. She is the recipient of a Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center. She currently serves as co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press. (Photo credit: John West)

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of ten books, including I Hotel, Finalist for the National Book Award; most recently, Dark Soil: Fictions & Mythographies; and the forthcoming Questions 27 & 28. Recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters and a United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Photo credit: Chris Hardy)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

Cathy Berner, a former school librarian, is the Children’s/Young Adult Specialist and Events Coordinator at Blue Willow Bookshop, an independent bookstore on the west side of Houston, Texas. She had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the 2021 Walter Awards administered by We Need Diverse Books. Cathy also serves as the programming coordinator for three literary festivals: Bookworm, TweensRead, and TeenBookCon, all of which promote reading and literacy by connecting young readers and authors. (Photo credit: Mary Cate Stevenson & Noah Nofz)

David Bowles (Chair) is a Mexican American author and translator from South Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Among his 40 award-winning titles are My Two Border Towns, They Call Me Güero, and The Prince & the Coyote. In 2020, David co-founded the hashtag advocacy movement #DignidadLiteraria, which has helped arbitrate for greater Latino representation in publishing. David also serves as the President of the Texas Institute of Letters. (Photo credit: Loba)

candice iloh is the award-winning author of young adult novels Every Body Looking, Break This House, and Salt the Water. A 2020 National Book Award Finalist and 2021 Printz Award Honoree, candice is a first-generation Nigerian-American writer whose books center home. They are a 2023-2025 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellow in the Arts and received the 2024 Leeway Foundation Transformation Award. candice’s debut picture book EMEKA: EAT EGUSI! is forthcoming. (Photo credit: Justin Lamar Carter)

Jung Kim, PhD is Professor of Literacy and Co-Chair of the Department of Education at Lewis University. She is a mother to two teens, an ultrarunner, a school board member, and will always hold it down for the Midwest. She reads and writes about literature, race, and equity, and gets to call it her job. (Photo credit: Joey Tesch)

Maulik Pancholy is an award-winning actor, author, and activist. His career has spanned hit television shows, animated favorites, the Broadway stage, and several feature films. His debut novel, The Best at It, won a 2020 Stonewall Honor in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, and his sophomore novel, Nikhil Out Loud, won a 2023 Lambda Literary Award and was named a Kirkus Best Book of 2022. He is a cofounder of the anti-bullying nonprofit ActToChange.org. (Photo credit: Luke Fontana)