Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of many books across genre, most recently, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Ewing is an Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, and a co-owner of Build Coffee & Books. (Photo credit: Mercedes Zapata)

Audrey I-Wei Huang is a frontline bookseller at Belmont Books in Belmont, Massachusetts. She’s served on the American Bookseller Association’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Advisory Council, the New England Independent Booksellers Association Advisory Council, the Massachusetts Book Awards Nonfiction judging panel, the Duende-Word BIPOC Bookseller Award judging panel, and the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence for Fiction and Nonfiction selection committee. In 2024, Audrey was named Handseller of the Year by the Book Publisher Representatives of New England. (Photo credit: Christopher J. Bradford)

Jonathan C. Slaght, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, is an author of creative nonfiction. His Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China was named one of 2025’s best books by the Minnesota Star Tribune, BookPage, and CounterPunch. His debut book Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl was Longlisted for a National Book Award for Nonfiction, and won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction. He lives in Minneapolis. (Photo Credit: Matt Garton)

Robert Warrior (Chair), is a writer and scholar whose books include Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee and The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction. He teaches the history of Indigenous writing and media at the University of Kansas and has previously taught at Harvard University, Cornell University, Haskell Indian Nations University, the University of Oklahoma, and others. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. (Photo credit: KU Marketing)

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the nonfiction books Reading the Waves, The Chronology of Water, The Misfit's Manifesto, and Allegories of Violence, as well as the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase. She is a two-time Oregon Book Award recipient and has received awards and grants from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, Poets & Writers, and Literary Arts. She is the founder of Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon. (Photo credit: Andrew Kovalev)