Matt Bell is the author of the novel Appleseed and the craft book Refuse to Be Done. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall and the nonfiction book Baldur’s Gate II. He is a professor of English at Arizona State University.

A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis (Chair) is the author of six novels, including Cantoras and The Palace of Eros, as well as the work of nonfiction So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color. Their works have been translated into 17 languages and have received numerous awards, including the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award, two Stonewall Book Awards, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. (Photo credit: Irene Young)

Danielle King is general manager of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, MO, where she previously worked as part-time bookseller, full-time used books buyer, and assistant manager. She is a member of the American Bookseller Association’s Bookseller Advisory Committee, and has served on panels for the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association and American Booksellers Association. (Photo credit: Andrea King, ℅ Left Bank Books)

Akhil Sharma is a novelist and short story writer. His novel Family Life won the International Dublin Literary Award. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta. He is the Adele Schiff Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University. (Photo credit: Fergus Ryan)

Diane Wilson is a Dakota writer, educator, and bog steward, enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation. She has published six award-winning books as well as essays in numerous publications. Her novel, The Seed Keeper, won the 2022 Minnesota Book Award and is a selection for the 2026 NEA Big Read. Wilson’s work explores seed sovereignty, cultural recovery, and environmental stewardship. She is currently working on a memoir, Mapping My Way Home: A Story of Love, Loss, and a Bog. (Photo credit: Sarah Whiting)

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)

Rob Arnold is a CHamoru poet, essayist, arts leader, and author of To the Unnamed, forthcoming. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Adroit Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, Solstice, and Poem-a-Day, among others, and has been anthologized in New CHamoru Literature and Na’huyong: An Anthology of CHamoru Literature. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he serves as Executive Director of Poets House. (Photo credit: Jennifer Haigh)

Aracelis Girmay’s (Chair) most recent publication is Green of All Heads. She served as the editor of So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth and How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton. A finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. She teaches at Stanford University. (Photo credit: Yekaterina Gyadu)

Jon Pineda is the author of six books: three poetry collections, two novels, and one memoir. His work has twice received the Library of Virginia Literary Award, for poetry and fiction. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New England Review, Five Points, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia and teaches at William & Mary.

Roger Reeves is the author of King Me, Best Barbarian, and Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. Best Barbarian was a winner of the Griffin Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, and Finalist for the National Book Award, among others. Dark Days: Fugitive Essays won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Creative Non-Fiction. His poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas. (Photo credit: Ana Schwartz)

Rosanna Warren is a Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. She is the author of seven books of poetry—most recently, Hindsight, So Forth, and Ghost in a Red Hat—and the biography, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. (Photo credit: Claire Holt)

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a professional translator of Russian and Uzbek in Seattle, Washington, where she runs the Northwest Literary Translators, manages a library consulting business, and serves on the advisory board of the Translation Studies Hub at the University of Washington. Her translation practice focuses on the contemporary literature of Central Asia. Shelley’s translation of Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers: A Ghazal Novel was a Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Javier García del Moral was trained as a civil engineer, working on roads and bridges in Spain, Ireland, the Middle East, and the United States. He is the founder of The Wild Detectives, the Dallas bookstore-bar opened in 2014, which has hosted more than 1,000 literary and cultural events and is widely recognized as a cornerstone of the city’s independent arts scene. He also coordinates Hay Festival Forum Dallas, helping position the city as an international meeting point for contemporary literature and ideas. (Photo credit: Andrew Ryan Shepherd)

John Keene is the author of a handful of books, including Punks: New & Selected Poems, Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry; and the award-winning Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas. With Robert F. Reid-Pharr he co-edited Essex Hemphill’s Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems. His translations include Hilda Hilst’s novel, Letters from a Seducer. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. (Photo credit: Nina Subin)

Christopher Merrill (Chair) is the author of many books of poetry, nonfiction, and translation, among them On the Road to Lviv; Flares; The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War; and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. He directed the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa from 2000–2025, and served on both the National Council on the Humanities and the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. (Photo credit: Tim Schoon)

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Fra Keeler, Savage Tongues, and Call Me Zebra, winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a Whiting Award, is a past National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright Program, the Aspen Institute, and MacDowell. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, among other publications. She is the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. (Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

Edith Campbell is an emerita faculty member at Indiana State University and a founder of the We Are Kid Lit Collective, which curates an annual summer reading list recognizing the humanity of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in youth literature across intersections of identity. Her work promoting literacy and social justice has been featured by NPR, The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Edith currently blogs at Pearl’s & Ruby’s online. (Photo credit: Charles Huca Bera Laster)

Brandy Colbert (Chair) is an author of books for children and teens, including Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, The Only Black Girls in Town, and Little & Lion. Her work has received the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and the Stonewall Book Award, and was a finalist for the Young Adult Library Services Association Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. She lives in Los Angeles. (Photo credit: Photos by Jamaal)

Tricia Ebarvia is a lifelong educator, activist, and speaker. After teaching high school for twenty years, she is currently an administrator at an independent school in Philadelphia. A co-founder of the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy, Tricia works with educators across the country on curriculum and instruction. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Tricia is the author of Get Free: Antibias Literacy Instruction for Stronger Readers, Writers, and Thinkers.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of more than 50 titles for young readers. Over his 25-year career in publishing, he has given young readers the Lunch Lady graphic novels; the graphic memoir, Hey, Kiddo—a National Book Award Finalist; and several picture books. Krosoczka has also collaborated across media with Crayola, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Apple TV. (Photo credit: StudioJJK LLC)

Anne Ursu is the author of acclaimed novels Not Quite a Ghost, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, The Lost Girl, Breadcrumbs, and The Real Boy, among others. Her work has been selected as a National Book Award Longlister, a Kirkus Prize finalist, and as a best book of the year by Parents magazine, NPR, Bookshop.org, and Publishers Weekly. She lives in Minneapolis. (Photo credit: John J. Ursu)