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 2024.

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.

Chelsea Leu has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and others. She was an NBCC Emerging Critic in 2018-2019. Her term ends in 2024.

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.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three collections of poetry: Beautiful in the Mouth, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize; The Keys to the Jail; and All Its Charms, which includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Narrative, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Orion, The Believer, and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her term ends in 2024.

Anita Felicelli is the author of the forthcoming short story collection "How We Know Our Time Travelers" and a work of literary criticism, "The Outcast," as well as "Chimerica: A Novel" and the award-winning short story collection "Love Songs for a Lost Continent." She is the editor of Alta Journal's California Book Club. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in the Bay Area with her family. Her term ends in 2024.

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.

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.

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 2024.

Jennie Hann earned her PhD in English from Johns Hopkins. She serves on NBCC reading committees for Biography and Criticism and is at work on her own writing projects in those genres. Her term ends in 2024.

Maris Kreizman is the host of The Maris Review, a weekly literary podcast from Lit Hub. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, and more. Her essay collection, I WANT TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins. Her term ends in 2024.

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.

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.

Joanna Scutts is a literary critic and feminist historian based in Paris. She is the author of Hotbed: Bohemian New York and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism (Seal Press, 2022), and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It (Liveright, 2017). Her book reviews, profiles, and critical essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, and New Yorker online. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her term ends in 2025.

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 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.

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.