Board of Directors

Laurie Hertzel is the senior editor for books at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the author of a memoir, “News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist,” published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010 and winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Her work has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, the Chicago Tribune, Minnesota Monthly magazine, and many other publications in the United States, Finland, and Australia. She has an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, N.C. Hertzel teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Her current term on the NBCC board ends in 2022. Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2022.

Kerri Arsenault is a columnist at LitHub.com, and her work has appeared various publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, American Book Review, Kirkus, and Freeman’s. She is currently working on a book about Maine (Picador, 2019) where she is from. She received her MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from The New School. Literary Tweets @kerriarsenault. Her current term on the Board ends in 2021. Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2021.

Jane Ciabattari is a former NBCC president, a regular contributor to BBC Culture and The Literary Hub, and author of the story collection Stealing the Fire. Her book reviews and cultural criticism have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, NPR, Bookforum, Paris Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others. She is a member of the Writers Grotto, on advisory boards of The Story Prize, the Bay Area Book Festival, and Lit Camp, a Pushcart Prize contributing editor, and a co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective, a San Francisco-based reading series. Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2023.

Connie Ogle is a reporter at the Miami Herald, where she began covering the book beat in the 1990s. She became the Herald’s book editor and worked in that role for more than 15 years. She is currently a contributor for such publications as Kirkus, Newsday and the Star Tribune and runs the Herald Facebook group Readers With Attitude. Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2023.

Carlin Romano is critic-at-large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Ursinus College. His current term on the NBCC board term ends in 2022.

Richard Z. Santos is a writer and teacher in Austin, TX. His debut novel, Trust Me, is out now from Arte Público Press. His work has appeared in multiple venues, including Texas Monthly, Kirkus Reviews, The Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, Nimrod, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many more. He can be found at www.richardzsantos.com. His current term on the board ends in 2021.

Michael Schaub is a freelance journalist and a regular contributor to NPR, The Los Angeles Times, and Men’s Journal. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas. His current term on the NBCC board ends in 2022.

David Varno is the fiction reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and a freelance critic. He received an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University and his writing has appeared in BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Electric Literature, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday, On the Seawall, Paste, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and other publications. His current term on the board ends in 2022.

Longtime All Things Considered commentator (1991-2006) Marion Winik is the host of The Weekly Reader radio show and podcast. She reviews books for Newsday, People, Kirkus Review and other venues. She is the author of First Comes Love, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead and seven other books. Her monthly column at BaltimoreFishbowl.com has received the “Best Column” and “Best Humorist” awards from Baltimore Magazine, and her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun and many other publications. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore. More info at marionwinik.com. Her current term on the Board ends in 2022.

Jacob M. Appel teaches writing and bioethics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where he serves as Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry. He is the author of fifteen volumes of fiction, two non-fiction books and a poetry collection. In his spare time, he is an emergency room physician. More at: www.jacobmappel.com. His current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2023.

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.

Gregg Barrios is a playwright, poet, and journalist. He is a 2013 USC Annenberg Getty Fellow, and serves on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. He was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters this year. He is the 2015 Fall Visiting Writer at Our Lady of the Lake University. His work has appeared in Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Film Quarterly, San Francisco Chronicle, and Andy Warhol’s Interview. He is a former book editor of the San Antonio Express-News. He has received a CTG-Mark Taper Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Grant, and a 2013 Artist Foundation Grant for his theater work. His play Ship of Fools about Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter premieres this year in San Antonio’s Overtime Theater. He is collaborating with actor and filmmaker James Franco on a book of his experimental work in poetry and film. His current term on the board ends in 2021.

Victoria Chang’s fourth book of poems, Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney’s) won The PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2017, along with the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. She is a contributing editor of Copper Nickel and a poetry editor at Tupelo Quarterly. She teaches at Antioch University’s MFA program in Los Angeles. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com. Her current term on the board ends in 2021.

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.

Charles Finch is the author of several bestselling novels, including The Last Enchantments and The Woman in the Water. He is a regular critic for the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and received the 2017 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Los Angeles. His current term on the NBCC board ends in 2021.

Carolyn Kellogg is a writer and critic. She is the former Books Editor of the Los Angeles Times, where she launched the slate of literary Critics at Large, and is an award-winning culture writer. Her work has been published widely. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama and can be found on Twitter @paperhaus. Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2022.

Megan Labrise is editor-at-large of Kirkus Reviews. She hosts Kirkus’ weekly podcast, Fully Booked, and interviews writers of all genres. Her current term on the board ends in 2023.

Jessica Loudis is an editor and writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and many other fine literary outlets. She has been an editor at Bookforum, Al Jazeera, and Conjunctions, and was the founding editor of the book review website Idiom. Her NBCC term ends in 2023.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics, philosophy and music history at Columbia University. He writes for Time, CNN, the Atlantic and various publications on language and on race issues, and is the author of Words on the Move, Doing Our Own Thing, Losing the Race, The Language Hoax, The Power of Babel, and other books. He has authored four audiovisual sets on language for the Teaching Company and spoken at TED twice. He also does Slate’s language podcast Lexicon Valley. His current term on the Board ends in 2023.

Ismail Muhammad is a writer and critic based in Oakland, California, where he's a staff writer for the Millions, contributing editor at ZYZZYVA Literary Magazine, and Ph.D. candidate in English at U.C. Berkeley. His writing has appeared in Slate, the Paris Review, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. You can and find him on Twitter @trapmotives. His current term on the board ends in 2021.

Katherine A. Powers is a freelance critic and the recipient of the 2013 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She is the editor of “Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942-1963” (FSG, 2013). Her term on the NBCC board ends in 2021.

Madeleine Schwartz has written for The London Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper’s, Politico, Artforum, and The New York Review of Books, where she worked as an editor for several years. Her writing has been supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation. Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2022.

Elizabeth Taylor, co-editor of The National Book Review and Literary Editor at Large of the Chicago Tribune, has served as President of the NBCC. The co-author of “American Pharaoh,” she edited both the Books and Sunday Magazine sections of the Chicago Tribune, and was a national correspondent for Time magazine, based in New York and then Chicago. Her term on the NBCC board ends in 2021.

Hope Wabuke is the author of the chapbooks Movement No. 1: Trains and The Leaving. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation. A National Book Critics Circle board member, she is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her current term on the NBCC Board ends in 2022.