Board of Directors

Megan Labrise is the editor-at-large of Kirkus Reviews. She interviews authors and hosts the weekly podcast Fully Booked. Her term ends in 2023.

Jacob M. Appel MD JD MPH is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where he serves as Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and Assistant Director of Academy for Medicine & the Humanities. He is currently co-chair of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry’s Committee on Psychiatry and the Law and the author of twenty volumes of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Who Says You're Dead? (Algonquin, 2019), a compendium of ethical dilemmas.

Colette Bancroft has been the book editor at the Tampa Bay Times since 2007 and has received several journalism awards for her reviews and articles. She also directs the annual Times Festival of Reading, which presents 40 to 50 authors to 5,000 attendees. She is the editor of and a contributor to the short story anthology Tampa Bay Noir (Akashic 2020). Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2023.

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, Bookforum, 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, and 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 founder of the Flash Fiction Collective, a San Francisco reading series.

Willow Naomi Curry is a native Houstonian writer, social practice artist, and arts reporter/critic whose work focuses on Texas and the cultural, political, and economic forces that shape it. She is authoring her debut YA novel ARCADIA and is a contributing arts and literary reporter for Southwest Contemporary magazine.

Maris Kreizman is the host of The Maris Review, an intimate weekly literary podcast produced by Lit Hub. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, the New Republic, Publishers Weekly, and more. She’s the creator of Slaughterhouse 90210, a Tumblr blog and a book (Flatiron Books, 2015) that celebrates the intersection of literature and pop culture. A current board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has served as a judge for the annual NBCC awards as well as the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She was previously the marketing director at McNally Jackson, the editorial director of Book of the Month, the editorial director of digital content at B&N.com, and a publishing outreach lead at Kickstarter. She began her publishing career as an aspiring editor at Free Press/S&S. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her dog, and her books.

Chelsea Leu has written for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and others. She is book reviews editor at the Rumpus, and was an NBCC Emerging Critic in 2018-2019.

Tara Wanda Merrigan is a writer living in Vienna. Her writing has been featured in The Paris Review, The Millions, and Literary Hub. You can find her on Twitter at @tarawandam.

Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. Her criticism has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, 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.

Ruben Quesada, Ph.D. is editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2022) and author of Revelations (2018), Next Extinct Mammal (2011), and translator of Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda (2008). Dr. Quesada has served as an editor for AGNI, Pleiades, and The Kenyon Review. His writing appears in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. He is an Associate Teaching Fellow at The Attic Institute and teaches for the UCLA Writers’ Program.

David Varno is the fiction reviews editor at Publishers Weekly. His work has also appeared in BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Literary Review, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newsday, On the Seawall, Tin House, and Words Without Borders.

Diego Báez is a poet, critic, educator, and abolitionist. His writing has appeared online and in print. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters and an Editor at Chicago Review of Books, Mandana Chaffa’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies. She also serves on the board of The Flow Chart Foundation, and was an NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow in 2021-2022. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.

May-lee Chai (翟梅莉 is a Chinese American author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, recipient of the 2019 American Book Award. Her short prose has appeared widely including in the Paris Review Online, Longreads, Los Angeles Times, and Seventeen. 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 new story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai, is forthcoming in fall 2022 from Blair.

Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Guardian. His graphic novel, Olivia Twist, was published by Dark Horse in 2019. Adam is the Books Editor for Words Without Borders. He teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University.

Anita Felicelli is the author of the novel Chimerica and the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. She is the editor of Alta Journal's California Book Club, and a freelance critic who has contributed to the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic who lives in Dallas, Texas. Her reviews and features are published in several online and print publications including The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, The Rumpus, Full Stop, World Literature Today, and Rain Taxi. She is a fiction judge for the Best Translated Book Award, and is a co-owner and the book buyer at Interabang Books in Dallas. Her current term on the board ends in 2023.

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, including Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021), and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon, 2012), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poetry, prose, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is cofounder and editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Memorious and the current writer-in-residence at the Hemingway Birthplace in Oak Park. She teaches in MFA programs at Northwestern University and OSU Cascades.

Jennie Hann earned her Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins, where she is presently a Fellow in the Writing Seminars. She's at work on a biography of the late poet Mark Strand.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, The Keys to the Jail (2014), and All Its Charms (2019), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives in Missoula where she is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana, Editor of Poetry Northwest, and a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.

Jo Livingstone is a writer based in New York.

J. Howard Rosier’s writing has appeared in Bookforum, Art in America, 4Columns, Poetry, Frieze, The Nation, and elsewhere. He is a co-curator at Exhibit B—a bimonthly text-based performance series—and a lecturer in the New Arts Journalism department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Joanna Scutts is a literary critic and cultural historian based in New York. She is the author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism, forthcoming from Seal Press/Hachette in Jun 2022, and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It (Liveright, 2017). Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Paris Review, Slate, and the New Yorker online, among many other venues. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Elizabeth Taylor, past president of the National Book Critics Circle, has chaired five Pulitzer Prize juries and is co-author of "American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen. Together they founded The National Book Review. Twice juror of the Mark Lynton/J. Anthony Lukas prizes, she has chaired the Harold Washington Literary Award four times and is Creative Director of the Printers Row Lit Fest. Long-time Time Magazine Correspondent, and Chicago Tribune Literary and Sunday magazine editor, she currently serves as Literary Editor at Large. She is writing a book about women during the Civil War and Reconstruction.