Board of Directors

Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. Her criticism has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Alta Journal of California, among other publications. She lives in Elk Grove, California. Her term ends in 2027.

Colette Bancroft is the book critic at the Tampa Bay Times, Florida's largest newspaper. She has been a journalist for 35 years, and before that she taught literature at several universities. She directs her newspaper's annual Times Festival of Reading, and her recent projects include editing the anthology "Tampa Bay Noir." Her term ends in 2026.

Jacob M. Appel is a psychiatrist and bioethicist in New York City. His term ends in 2026.

Mandana Chaffa is founder and editor-in-chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters and a finalist for CLMP’s Best Magazine: Debut; as well as an Editor-at-Large at Chicago Review of Books. She is also the president of the board of The Flow Chart Foundation, which explores poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of American poet John Ashbery. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York. Her term ends in 2025.

Jane Ciabattari is the author of the short story collection "Stealing the Fire," an Iowa Short Fiction finalist selected for the Dzanc Books rEprint Series. She is a former NBCC president, a columnist for Lit Hub, and has contributed to BBC Culture, NPR, the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Poets & Writers Magazine and Alta. She was Life of Letters Lecturer at Bennington's Graduate Writing Seminars, Distinguished Writer in Residence at Knox College, and fiction writer-in-residence at Chautauqua's Writers' Center. She serves on the advisory board of The Story Prize, on the program steering committee of the Bay Area Book Festival and Lit Camp, as a contributing editor to the Pushcart Prize; she is a member of the Writers Grotto and a co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective, a San Francisco reading series. Her term ends in 2026.

Rebecca Hussey is a teacher, writer, and critic living in Connecticut. Her writing has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Kenyon Review, Full Stop, The Rumpus, and more. She is a co-host of the One Bright Book podcast and author of the Substack newsletters Reading Indie and #KateBriggs24. She is a Professor of English at Connecticut State Community College Norwalk. Her term ends in 2025.

Christoph Irmscher is a critic and biographer. A native of Germany, he has lived in the United States for more than three decades. His books include The Poetics of Natural History (Rutgers) and Longfellow Redux (Illinois) as well as biographies of Louis Agassiz (Houghton Mifflin) and Max Eastman (Yale). His most recent book is Audubon at Sea (with Richard King; University of Chicago Press). He is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal and teaches English at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also directs a scholarship program, the Wells Scholars. He has been at work on a book about old family photographs, sections of which have appeared in Raritan. His term ends in 2027.

Lauren LeBlanc is a writer and editor who has been published in The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. A graduate of Bryn Mawr and Dartmouth Colleges, she has worked at Alfred A. Knopf, Atlas & Co., Penguin Random House, Guernica Magazine, and has served as a nonfiction committee member for the Brooklyn Book Festival. A native New Orleanian, she now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her term ends in 2026.

Jo Livingstone is a writer based in New York. Their term ends in 2025.

Michael Schaub is a regular contributor to NPR and the Orange County Register, and a news correspondent for Kirkus Reviews. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. He lives in Georgetown, Texas. His term ends in 2026.

David Varno is the fiction reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and a former president of the NBCC. His work has appeared in Alta, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, the Literary Review, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newsday, On the Seawall, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. His term ends in 2025.

Tobias Carroll is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of five books, most recently the novel In the Sight. His writing has been published by Literary Hub, InsideHook, the New York Times, the Portland Press Herald, Reactor, and elsewhere. He writes a monthly column about books in translation for Words Without Borders and is the managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn. His term ends in 2027.

May-lee Chai (翟梅莉) is a Chinese American author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her short story collections, Tomorrow in Shanghai, a New York Times’ Editors Choice, and Useful Phrases for Immigrants, recipient of a 2019 American Book Award. Her short prose and reviews have appeared widely including in the New York Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Paris Review Online, Gulf Coast, and Kenyon Review Online. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and recipient of an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards. Her term ends in 2025.

Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. He is the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica Magazine, the Books Editor of Words Without Borders, and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. His term ends in 2025.

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, including Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021), named one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2021, and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon, 2012), shortlisted for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Catapult, and elsewhere. She is cofounder and editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Memorious and serves as a weekly reviewer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books. She teaches in the MFA program in Prose & Poetry at Northwestern University. Her term ends in 2027.

Mary Ann Gwinn writes about books and authors for Kirkus Reviews, The Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and other publications. A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, she was the book editor of the Seattle Times from 1998 to 2017, a judge for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and for five years was the co-host of Well Read, a national books and authors television show. She’s currently a nonfiction judge for the Kirkus Prize. Mary Ann lives in Seattle, where dozens of independent bookstores and two world-class library systems feed her lifelong books addiction. Her term ends in 2027.

Jonathan Leal is a Latino author, composer, and scholar based in Los Angeles. Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas region located at the border of the United States and Mexico, Leal creates writing, music, and integrative arts projects that amplify creative resistances to bordered life. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (2023), co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (2021), and co-creator of numerous musical projects, including, most recently, After Now (2022). Leal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California. His term ends in 2027.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the 2022 novel The Evening Hero, which was a Good Morning America Book Club Buzz pick. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and many others. She is a founder and former board president of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction at Columbia, where she is the Writer in Residence. Her term ends in 2026.

Rishi Reddi is the author of the novel Passage West, a Los Angeles Times “Best California Book of 2020” and Karma and Other Stories, which received the 2008 L.L. Winship /PEN New England Award for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, been broadcast on NPR, and earned honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize. Her reviews, essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Partisan Review, Alta Journal, and Air/Light, among others. Rishi has received fellowships and grants from the National Book Critics Circle, MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the U.S. Department of State. She lives in Cambridge, MA. Her term ends in 2027.

J. Howard Rosier is the new books columnist at Vulture. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Bookforum, The Nation, Art in America, 4Columns, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, and a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His term ends in 2026.

Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. She teaches writing in the English Department at Brown University. Her writing has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright, US Artists, the Brother Thomas Fund, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and residencies at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook. She is an immigrant from the Philippines and lives outside of Boston. Her term ends in 2027.

Elizabeth Taylor, Writer and Editor. She is under contract to write about a set of women in Civil War and post-Reconstruction era America. As Literary Editor at Large of the Chicago Tribune, Taylor oversaw its portfolio of prizes, and as Literary Editor of the Chicago Tribune and Editor of the Tribune Sunday Magazine from 1996 to 2014, she led all literary coverage. She also initiated a set of Tribune literary prizes and launched the newspaper-sponsored Printers Row Lit Fest, which became the largest gathering of writers and readers between the coasts, with an audience exceeding 150,000. For its new owners, she has served as Creative Director. Prior to joining the Tribune, Taylor was a TIME magazine national correspondent covering the twelve-state Midwest region and several national presidential campaigns. She was president of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) from 2002 to 2005. In 2017, she conceived and launched the NBCC’s Emerging Critic Fellowship to identify, support, and train a new generation of literary critics, and remains on its Board. Taylor has also chaired six Pulitzer Prize juries, served on another one and served for a year as Consultant on the Pulitzer Prize Centennial. Three-time chair of the Harold Washington Award Selection Committee, twice chair of Columbia University/Nieman Foundation selection committee. Elizabeth co-launched The National Book Review, an online journal of books and ideas, with Adam Cohen. She is the co-author (with Cohen) of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, a New York Times Best Books of the Year. Her term ends in 2025.

David Woo is the author of two books of poetry, Divine Fire and The Eclipses. His poetry and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, The Library of America, and other journals and anthologies. More information about him can be found at his website, davidwoo.info, and on Twitter @DavidWooPoet. He lives in Phoenix. His term ends in 2026.