Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She is a critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology.
(Photo credit: Maria Kanevskaya)
Calvin Crosby
Calvin Crosby
Calvin Crosby is a lifelong reader and co-owner of The King’s English Bookshop, the safe space that inspired his bookselling career. Crosby spent decades as a leader in the Northern California Independent Bookselling community, serving as Executive Director of their trade organization for six years. He also runs Brain Food Books, a nonprofit that puts new books into the hands of those without regular access.
(Photo credit: Ann Seaton)
Silas House
Silas House
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels including Lark Ascending, recipient of the 2023 Southern Book Prize for Fiction. In 2022, House was a recipient of the Duggins Prize. House’s work has been published in TIMEMagazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others. House serves as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing.
(Photo credit: C Williams)
Mat Johnson
Chair
Mat Johnson
Mat Johnson (Chair) is a Philip H. Knight Chair of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications included the novels Invisible Things and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the 2007 United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and the American Book Award.
(Photo credit: Andrea Walls)
Helena María Viramontes
Helena María Viramontes
Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories, and novels Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came with Them. She is currently working on a novel in triptych form entitled The Cemetery Boys. Viramontes is Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences in English at Cornell University and former director of Cornell’s Creative Writing Program.
(Photo credit: Lindsay France, Cornell University)
