Board of Directors

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. David has served as Fiction Chair and VP/Technology. His term ends in 2022.

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 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.

Anita Felicelli is a fiction writer and critic. She is the author of Chimerica: A Novel and Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. Her short stories have been published in various places, most recently Alta Journal, Air/Light, Midnight Breakfast, and Massachusetts Review. She regularly contributes reviews and criticism to the Los Angeles Review of Books and San Francisco Chronicle. Her nonfiction has also appeared in Slate, Salon, and the New York Times (Modern Love). Her term ends in 2024.

Maris Kreizman is the host of The Maris Review, a literary podcast. She's a writer and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and more. She was previously the marketing director for McNally Jackson and the editorial director for Book of the Month. Her term ends in 2024.

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. Her term ends in 2024.

Tara Wanda Merrigan is a Philadelphia-based essayist and a class of 2019 Emerging Critics Fellow. Her literary criticism and reportage, which often examines the intersection of literature and politics, has appeared online at The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, The Millions, etc. Her term ends in 2022.

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, Newsday, The Star Tribune, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She is a regular contributor to Kirkus and Alta Journal of California. Heather was the 2019-2020 critic in residence for UC Riverside’s Palm Desert MFA. She lives in Elk Grove, California, with her husband and two kids. Her term ends in 2024.

Ruben Quesada's writing appears in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and other anthologies and journals. He is currently editing an anthology of contemporary essays on Latinx poetry. He is a Spanish language translate and coordinator for Illinois Humanities. He edits a weekly column on writing and publishing featuring two contemporary poets for the Kenyon Review. His term ends in 2024.

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.

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.

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.

Diego Baez is a poet and critic based in Chicago. He is a recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator for Emerging Poets, and recently completed the Emerging Critics fellowship with NBCC. His reviews have appeared in The Georgia Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. His term 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 2024.

Stephanie Burt served on the NBCC board from 2010-2012, on the poetry and criticism committees, and as chair of criticism. She has been a working critic for national and international venues (NYTimes Book Review, London Review of Books, the Guardian, etc) as well as for alternative and academic journals (LA Review of Books, Rain Taxi, Metre, Michigan Quarterly Review, Xavier Files, etc) since the 1990s. Her first collection of critical essays, Close Calls with Nonsense, was an NBCC finalist in criticism; since then she has published several more books about poems, poets and poetry with Harvard UP and with Basic Books, as well as several more books of my own poems, including Advice from the Lights (2017), an NEA Big Read Selection. She is a Professor English at Harvard University. Her term ends in 2023.

Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Guardian. His graphic novel, OLIVIA TWIST, was published by Dark Horse in 2019. Adam is a book critic for Guernica Magazine. He teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University and Marymount Manhattan College. Adam is a graduate of NYU's Fiction MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. His term ends in 2024.

Rod Davis has worked in every kind of media—radio, television, wire service, newspapers, magazines, and books, in positions ranging from on-air reporter to senior writer to editor. He spent nine years teaching English, at UT-Austin and SMU, and was one of the first hires for the Texas Film Commission. He has written two novels and one nonfiction book. He began reviewing books in the seventies with the AP and The Texas Observer and continues most recently with The Baffler. His term ends in 2022.

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’s critical and creative work has appeared such places as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is the author of four collections of poems. She is co-founder and editor of Memorious, and she serves on the board of the University Press of Kentucky Poetry and Prose Series. She currently lives in Chicago where she teaches in the MFA program in Prose & Poetry at Northwestern University. Her term ends in 2024.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three collections of poems, and her work has been featured in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, as well as in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, and The Believer. Kuipers is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana and Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her term ends in 2024.

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

J. Howard Rosier’s writing has appeared in The New Criterion, Bookforum, 4Columns, Art in America, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his thesis work was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship. A former fellow in the National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics program, Rosier also edits Critics’ Union, a publication serving as an ombudsman for critical topics. His term ends in 2023.

Harriet Washington is the author of Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2007 PEN Oakland Award, and the 2007 American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. She has been a fellow in medical ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. Her term ends in 2022.