Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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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)
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)
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 TIME Magazine, 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)
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)
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)
Sonia Shah is a journalist and author of five books, including The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere.
(Photo credit: Glenford Nuñez)
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. Her 20 books include the novel The Cosmopolitans and Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York 1987-1993, a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary LGBTQ Nonfiction Award, the Publishing Triangle Special Award for Nonfiction, and the 2022 NLGJA Excellence in Book Writing Award. Schulman is the Endowed Chair in Nonfiction at Northwestern University and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
(Photo credit: Drew Stephens)
James Fugate is a retired book seller of nearly 42 years. Born and raised in Detroit, Fugate started at a small general bookstore, later moving into managing college bookstores. He helped start EsoWon Books, a well-known African American bookstore in Los Angeles. EsoWon was known for its great service, great selection, and great book events, having hosted Walter Mosley, Terry McMillan, President Bill Clinton, future President Barack Obama, Nikki Giovanni, and many others.
(Photo credit: Vanessa Cain)
Ada Ferrer (Chair) is the author most recently of Cuba: An American History, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. She has held fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University.
(Photo credit: Cundill History Prize, Owen Egan)
