Authors

Emily Bernard received her PhD in American studies from Yale University. She has been the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the NEH, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Resident Fellowship at Harvard University. Her essays have been published in The American Scholar, Best American Essays, and Best African American Essays. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her latest book, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine (Knopf) is an extraordinary, exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race--in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way--in twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays that explore, up-close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America's New England today. Henry Louis Gates calls it, "A major contribution." Washington Post says it’s, “magnificent.”

Jake Bernstein was a senior reporter on the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team that broke the Panama Papers story. In 2017, the project won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Bernstein earned his first Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for National Reporting, for coverage of the financial crisis. He has written for the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Guardian, ProPublica, and Vice, and has appeared on the BBC, NBC, CNN, PBS, and NPR. He was the editor of the Texas Observer and is the coauthor of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. His latest book is Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite (Henry Holt and Co.). A hidden circulatory system flows beneath the surface of global finance, carrying trillions of dollars from drug trafficking, tax evasion, bribery, and other illegal enterprises. In Secrecy World, the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Jake Bernstein explores this shadow economy and how it evolved, drawing on millions of leaked documents―a trove now known as the Panama Papers―as well as other journalistic and government investigations. Bernstein shows how shell companies operate, how they allow the super wealthy and celebrities to escape taxes, and how they provide cover for illicit activities on a massive scale by crime bosses and corrupt politicians across the globe. Secrecy World offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises critical questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted.

Julie Berry is the author of the 2017 Printz Honor and Los Angeles Times Book Prize shortlisted novel The Passion of Dolssa, the Carnegie and Edgar shortlisted All the Truth That’s in Me, and many other acclaimed middle grade novels and picture books. She holds a BS from Rensselaer in communication and an MFA from Vermont College. In Don't Let the Beasties Escape This Book! (Harry N. Abrams), it’s no ordinary day at the castle! This beautifully illustrated, silly picture book is a fun introduction to the medieval world and the illuminated bestiary.   In Long Ago, On a Silent Night (Orchard Books), the miracle of Christmas comes alive in this luminous celebration of unconditional love and the joy and hope and promise in every child. For children ages 4 to 8, Happy Right Now (Sounds True) teaches emotional intelligence with fun, relatable imagery and clever rhymes. And Lovely War (Penguin Books) is a sweeping, multi-layered romance set in the perilous days of World Wars I and II, where gods hold the fates--and the hearts--of four mortals in their hands.  

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, essayist, and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Felon, Bastards of the Reagan Era, and Shahid Reads His Own Palm, as well as a memoir, A Question of Freedom. A graduate of Yale Law School, he writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Felon (W. W. Norton & Company) tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems. It explores a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace, and in doing so, it creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. He also confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. Dan Chiasson wrote for The New Yorker that Felon “ shows how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative... The black bars of redacted text [in the redaction poems], which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours... For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences.”

Kai Bird is the Executive Director of CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography. He co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has also written biographies of John J. McCloy and McGeorge Bundy—and a memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis. His most recent book is The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. He is currently working on a biography of President Jimmy Carter.

Lisa Birnbach is an award-winning journalist, cultural commentator and bestselling author. Best known as the author of The Official Preppy Handbook and True Prep, she’s published 20 other books, which have been translated into a dozen languages. She’s written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Parade, Rolling Stone, New York, and other magazines in addition to Yahoo! She was a correspondent on CBS’s The Early Show for three years, and hosted The Lisa Birnbach Show, a daily syndicated radio show which received the Gracie Awards in 2007 for Outstanding Talk Show, and Outstanding Humor Show.

Dustin Lance Black is a filmmaker and social activist, known for writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay of the Harvey Milk biopic Milk, and for his part in overturning California’s discriminatory Proposition 8.  In Mama's Boy: A Story from Our Americas (Knopf), Black explores how he and his conservative Mormon mother built bridges across today’s great divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal. As an LGBTQ activist Black has unlikely origins—a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas. His mother, Anne, was raised in rural Louisiana and contracted polio when she was two years old. She endured brutal surgeries, as well as braces and crutches for life. Willfully defying expectations, she found salvation in an unlikely faith, and raised three rough-and-rowdy boys. By the time Lance came out to his mother at age twenty-one, he was a blue-state young man studying the arts instead of going on his Mormon mission. She derided his sexuality as a sinful choice and was terrified for his future. It may seem like theirs was a house destined to be divided, and at times it was. This story shines light on what it took to remain a family despite such division—a journey that stretched from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court to the woodsheds of East Texas. In the end, the rifts that have split a nation couldn’t end this relationship that defined and inspired their remarkable lives.

Sarah Blake is the author of the novels Grange House, the New York Times bestseller The Postmistress, and The Guest Book (Flatiron Books), a book, The Washington Post calls, “…monumental in a way that few novels dare attempt.” Kitty Milton and her husband, Ogden, are both from families considered the backbone of the country. But as they summer on their island in Maine, anchored as they are to the way things have always been, the winds of change are beginning to stir. In 1959 New York City, two strangers enter the Miltons’ circle. One captures the attention of Kitty’s daughter, while the other makes each of them question what the family stands for. This new generation insists the times are changing. And in one night, everything does. Moving through three generations and back and forth in time, The Guest Book asks how we remember and what we choose to forget. It shows the untold secrets we inherit and pass on, unknowingly echoing our parents and grandparents. Sarah Blake’s triumphant novel tells the story of a family and a country that buries its past in quiet, until the present calls forth a reckoning.

Sarah Blake is the author of the novels Grange House, the New York Times bestseller The Postmistress, and The Guest Book (Flatiron Books), a book, The Washington Post calls, “…monumental in a way that few novels dare attempt.” Kitty Milton and her husband, Ogden, are both from families considered the backbone of the country. But as they summer on their island in Maine, anchored as they are to the way things have always been, the winds of change are beginning to stir. In 1959 New York City, two strangers enter the Miltons’ circle. One captures the attention of Kitty’s daughter, while the other makes each of them question what the family stands for. This new generation insists the times are changing. And in one night, everything does. Moving through three generations and back and forth in time, The Guest Book asks how we remember and what we choose to forget. It shows the untold secrets we inherit and pass on, unknowingly echoing our parents and grandparents. Sarah Blake’s triumphant novel tells the story of a family and a country that buries its past in quiet, until the present calls forth a reckoning.

Richard Blanco’s mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family, arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born in 1968. Forty-five days later, the family immigrated once more to New York City. Only a few weeks old, Blanco already belonged to three countries, a foreshadowing of the concerns of place and belonging that would shape his life and work. Blanco’s parents encouraged him to study engineering, believing it would ensure a more stable and rewarding career for him. He took their advice, earning a degree from Florida International University in 1991, and began working as a consulting civil engineer in Miami. In his mid-20s he was compelled to express his creative side through writing. He returned to Florida International University, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing in 1997. Blanco’s published works include City of a Hundred Fires, Direction to The Beach of the Dead, and Looking for The Gulf Motel. In 2012, President Barack Obama selected Blanco to serve as the fifth presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history. The youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role, Blanco read “One Today,” an original poem he wrote for the occasion. In his first prose publication, For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey, Blanco shared the emotional details of his experiences as presidential inaugural poet and reflected on his understanding of what it means to be an American. Since the inauguration, Blanco has been named a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College and the University of Rhode Island. Now a faculty member in Florida International University’s Creative Writing department, he has gone on to publish the memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood and a fine-press book, Boundaries. In his latest collection of poetry, How to Love a Country, Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all.

Blanco Calderón, Rodrigo (Caracas, Venezuela, 1981) Narrador. Reside en Málaga, España. Completó su doctorado en Literatura y lingüística en la Universidad Paris XIII. Fue escritor invitado del International Writing Program de la Universidad de Iowa. Ha publicado los libros de cuentos Una larga fila de hombres (2005), Los invencibles (2007), Las rayas (2011), Emuntorios (2018). En 2016 publicó su primera novela, The Night, en España, que ha sido traducida al francés, al holandés y al checo; con ella obtuvo, ese mismo año, el premio “Rive Gauche à París a la mejor novela extranjera”, el Premio de la Crítica en Venezuela 2018 y, en 2019, el premio III Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa en la ciudad de Guadalajara, México. Presenta en la feria The Night, (Penguin Random House), novela y Los Terneros (Páginas de Espuma), una colección de cuentos.

Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author, previously, of the novella, Last Word. His short stories have appeared in Angels Flight, literary west, The Carolina Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Playboy, Sonora Review, and in Shanxi Literature, among others. He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. The unlikely heroes of his latest book, a collection of short stories entitled The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press), are trying to make their way in the world in the face of struggles big and small, both ancestral and circumstantial. This collection is a compelling blend of tragic and comical, quiet and radiant.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is a professor of politics at Whitman College, where he teaches courses dealing with food, immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border. His writing has appeared in Believer, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Salon, and Gastronomica. He is the author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf and Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) reveals the human consequences of militarizing what was once a more forgiving border. When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. Following a misstep that led to her deportation, Aida found herself in a Mexican city marked by violence, in a country that was not hers. To get back to the United States and reunite with her son, she embarked on a harrowing journey. Taking us into detention centers, immigration courts, and the inner lives of Aida and other daring characters Aaron Bobrow-Strain exposes a violently unequal America. He also shows us that the heroes of our current immigration wars are less likely to be perfect paragons of virtue than complex, flawed human beings who deserve justice and empathy all the same.

In 2008, Jamaican-born Gail Chang Bohr was elected Ramsey County’s first Asian American judge. She served as an international consultant with the National Center for State Courts’ Trinidad and Tobago Juvenile Court Project.  With degrees from Wellesley College and Simmons School of Social Work, Bohr had a 19+ year career as a clinical social worker in the U.S. and Hong Kong before entering law school, graduating magna cum laude from William Mitchell College of Law. She clerked for the Minnesota Supreme Court and was an associate at Faegre Baker Daniels. In 1995, she became founding executive director of Children’s Law Center of Minnesota where she trained 270+ volunteer lawyers to represent children in foster care, initiated award-winning programs and systemic reform for children in foster care.

Jaswinder Bolina is an American poet and essayist. He is author of Phantom Camera, Carrier Wave, and the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America. His poems and essays have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have been included in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry and The Norton Reader. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Bolina’s latest collection, 44^th of July (Omnidawn), is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom. These are the others in the everywhere, the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit but also where the physics meets the metaphysics. Both victim and complicit, part of the problem and apart from the problem, these are the Americans America didn’t invite.

Botero, Juan Carlos (Bogotá, Colombia, 1960) Narrador y periodista. Estudió literatura en las universidades Javeriana, los Andes y Harvard. Ha sido columnista de La Prensa y El Tiempo, y es ganador del Premio Juan Rulfo de Cuento y del Concurso Latinoamericano de Cuento. Sus libros incluyen Las semillas del tiempo: epífanos, Las ventanas y las voces, La sentencia, El arrecife, El idioma de las nubes y El arte de Fernando Botero. Es columnista de El Espectador. Estará conversando con el escritor Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Botero, Juan Carlos is a writer and journalist. He studied literature at the Javeriana and Los Andes universities in Colombia ,and Harvard University. He is a columnist at El Espectador, and has previously worked at La Prensa and El Tiempo, and for his short stories, he won the Juan Rulfo Prize and the award at the Concurso Latinoamericano de Cuento. His books include Las semillas del tiempo: epífanos, Las ventanas y las voces, La sentencia, El arrecife, El idioma de las nubes and El arte de Fernando Botero. He will appear in conversation with author Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Jo Ann Allen Boyce was one of twelve students to desegragate Clinton High School in 1956. She has worked as a professional singer and a nurse. She lives in Los Angeles. She is the co-author of This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School (Equality Bloomsbury Children's Books). In 1956, one year before federal troops escorted the Little Rock 9 into Central High School, fourteen year old Jo Ann Allen was one of twelve African-American students who broke the color barrier and integrated Clinton High School in Tennessee. At first things went smoothly for the Clinton 12, but then outside agitators interfered, pitting the townspeople against one another. Uneasiness turned into anger, and even the Clinton Twelve themselves wondered if the easier thing to do would be to go back to their old school. Jo Ann--clear-eyed, practical, tolerant, and popular among both black and white students---found herself called on as the spokesperson of the group. But what about just being a regular teen? This is the heartbreaking and relatable story of her four months thrust into the national spotlight and as a trailblazer in history. Based on original research and interviews and featuring backmatter with archival materials and notes from the authors on the co-writing process.

Robert Boyers is editor of Salmagundi, professor of English at Skidmore College, and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He is the author of ten previous books and the editor of a dozen others. He writes often for such magazines as Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Yale Review, and Granta. He is author of The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies (Scribner), a thought-provoking volume of nine essays that elegantly and fiercely addresses recent developments in American culture and argues for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition. Part memoir and part polemic, an anatomy of important and dangerous ideas, and a cri de coeur lamenting the erosion of standard liberal values, Boyers’s collection of essays is devoted to such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.

T.C. Boyle has published fourteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his novel World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau award for excellence in nature writing. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent novel, Outside Looking In (Ecco) is a provocative exploration of the first scientific and recreational forays into LSD and its mind-altering possibilities. A coterie of grad students at Harvard are drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology Ph.D. student and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers, and instead turns into a free-wheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living. Is LSD a belief system? Does it allow you to see God? Can the Loneys’ marriage—or any marriage, for that matter—survive the chaotic and sometimes orgiastic use of psychedelic drugs? Wry, witty, and wise, Outside Looking In is an utterly engaging and occasionally trippy look at the nature of reality, identity, and consciousness, as well as our seemingly infinite capacities for creativity, re-invention, and self-discovery.

Liz Braswell spent her childhood reading fairy tales, catching frogs, and going on adventures in the woods with her stuffed animals. She has a degree in Egyptology from Brown University (and yes, she can write your name in hieroglyphs). After making video games for ten years Liz now writes full-time and plays video games for fun. She has written Snow, Rx, The Nine Lives of Chloe King, and several books in the best-selling Twisted Tales series, including Part of Your World and As Old as Time. In Stuffed (Disney-Hyperion), everyone thinks that Clark is too old to still play with stuffed animals. He's almost eleven! Bullies target him at school while his mother tries increasingly un-subtle ways to wean him off his toys and introduce more "normal" interests. But Clark can't shake the feeling that his stuffed friends are important, even necessary. Sometimes they move around in the night, and sometimes in the morning they look a little worse for wear, as if they've engaged in battle. And it turns out . . . he's right.Stuffed confirms every kid's dream: that stuffed animals do have a life and a purpose, and that sometimes the most unconventional friendships are also the most valuable.

Dr. Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has received seven honorary doctorates in American Studies. He works in many capacities in the world of public history, including for boards, museums, colleges and historical societies. Six of his books were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” and seven became New York Times bestsellers. He received a Grammy Award in 2017 as co-producer of Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom. His latest book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race (Harper) takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon. In this engrossing, fast-paced epic, Douglas Brinkley returns to the 1960s to recreate one of the most exciting and ambitious achievements in the history of humankind. American Moonshot brings together the extraordinary political, cultural, and scientific factors that fueled the birth and development of NASA and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, which shot the United States to victory in the space race against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. The Washington Post writes, “Compelling and comprehensive…., American Moonshot transcends mere narrative to help the rest of us understand how America geared up for the astonishing feat of landing a man on the moon.”

Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the co-founder, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the National Magazine Award-winning Zoetrope: All-Story. She has worked as a book editor and is currently the executive director of Aspen Words. Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is a daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity. On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me. Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.

Daniel Brook is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. His last book, A History of Future Cities, was longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and selected as one of the ten best books of the year by the Washington Post. His newest book, The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction (W. W. Norton & Company)is a technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white. In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

Sarah M. Broom’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, and O, The Oprah magazine among others. She received her Master’s in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She is author of The Yellow House (Grove Press).  In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.

Jericho Brown is the author of The New Testament (2014), which received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Please (2008), which received the 2009 American Book Award. His most recent book, The Tradition is a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. Brown worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated with a BA from Dillard University in 1998. The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press) details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate and at their very core a distillation of the human. With clarity and a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues, he makes poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma, questioning the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and celebrating how we survive. U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith noted that “These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don't merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters―loss, desire, rage, becoming―and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense.”

Jeffrey Brown is the Eisner Award-winning artist and author of the Darth Vader™ and Son series. A lifelong Star Wars fan, he lives in Chicago. Rey and Pals (Chronicle Books) is his most recent book. What if Rey hadn't grown up all alone on dusty planet Jakku, but instead had a galaxy of friends to play with? Rey and Pals is a collection of adventures starring young Rey and Kylo, Finn and Poe, Hux and Phasma, Rose and BB-8—all under the watch of Luke, General Leia, Han, and Chewie. Jeffrey Brown's charmingly hilarious vision is sure to delight Star Wars® fans of all ages. Rey and Pals joins the collection of perennial favorites like Goodnight Darth Vader, Darth Vader and Son, Vader’s Little Princess, and Darth Vader and Friends.

Jason "Rachel" Brown is a rising young star in Hollywood who has studied dramatic and comedic acting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He often draws on his own life to entertain and inspire, including his experience connecting with his father, Karamo Brown, at the age of ten. I Am Perfectly Designed (Henry Holt and Co.) is an exuberant celebration of loving who you are, exactly as you are, from Karamo Brown, the Culture Expert of Netflix's hit series Queer Eye, and Jason Brown—featuring illustrations by Anoosha Syed. In this empowering ode to modern families, a boy and his father take a joyful walk through the city, discovering all the ways in which they are perfectly designed for each other. Kirkus writes, "With tenderness and wit, this story captures the magic of building strong childhood memories. The Browns and Syed celebrate the special bond between parent and child with joy and flair..."

Emmy award-winning journalist, Jeffrey Brown is the Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture, and Society at PBS the NewsHour. He has interviewed artists and writers in addition to reporting from the field. His work has taken him all over the world, from Haiti to Myanmar as he searches for the connections between news and poetry. He is the creator and host of “Art Beat,” which is the NewsHour’s online arts and culture blog. As a producer and a correspondent, his work has earned him an Emmy, five Cine Golden Eagle Awards, and other honors. In Brown’s debut poetry collection, The News (Copper Canyon Press), he re-imagines and re-tells his experiences through poems that explore stories he’s covered, places he’s gone, people he’s met, the thrills and doubts of his profession, as well as the profound intimacy of family.

Kevin Adonis Browne is a photographer, poet, archivist, and scholar of contemporary rhetoric and Caribbean culture. His previous books include Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean. He is currently based in Trinidad, where he works at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine. His latest book High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (University Press of Mississippi) was Overall Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas―a key feature of Trinidad performance―as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.

Ayse Papatya Bucak’s short fiction has been selected for the O. Henry and Pushcart prizes. She is an associate professor in the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Her debut story collection, The Trojan War Museum: and Other Stories (W. W. Norton & Company), “is a wonder cabinet of stories so singular and marvelous that I spent a long time after each, wanting to linger in the space it had created,” according to writer Kelly Link. In Bucak’s dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating, and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is “performed” at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war. A joy and a provocation, Bucak’s stories confront the nature of historical memory with humor and humanity. Surreal and poignant, they examine the tension between myth and history, cultural categories and personal identity, performance and authenticity.