Ben George is a former executive editor at Little, Brown, where he acquired and edited national bestsellers by authors including Adam Haslett, Leslie Jamison, Nathan Harris, Rick Bass, Rutger Bregman, Edith Pearlman, and Luis Alberto Urrea. Books he has published have been winners of or nominees for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Story Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award, among others. Before joining Little, Brown, he was an editor at Viking Penguin, prior to which he was an editor at the literary magazines Tin House and Ecotone, where he edited writers including Emma Cline, Anthony Doerr, Lauren Groff, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Yiyun Li, Rebecca Makkai, Ron Rash, Jim Shepard, Maggie Shipstead, and Kevin Wilson, among many others. While at Ecotone, he co-founded Lookout Books, whose debut publication, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist. Debut novels he has published include the Oprah’s Book Club selection The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris; the Carnegie Medal winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, by Tom Lin; the #1 Indie Next selection The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, by Nathaniel Ian Miller; and Jaroslav Kalfař’s Spaceman of Bohemia, from which the Netflix film Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan, was adapted.
2019 Editors
Photo Credit: David Walter Banks
Christine Pride is a writer, editor and 15-year publishing veteran. She has held posts at various Big Five imprints, including Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and, most recently, as a Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster. She also had a wonderful stint as a freelance editor and ghostwriter. In October 2018, Christine sold two novels, written with Jo Piazza, to Harper Collins/Morrow. She stepped away from a full-time role at S&S in order to focus on those projects, though she still serves as an editor at large. The first book, We Are Not Like Them, will be published in Spring 2020. As an editor, Christine has published a range of books, with a special emphasis on inspirational stories and memoirs, including Heaven is Here, A Reason to Believe, No One Tells You This, and Dear World. Christine attended the University of Missouri’s broadcast journalism program and worked in non-profit management before embarking on a career in book publishing. www.christinepride.com
Photo Credit: Brie Mulligan
Jack Shoemaker has been a bookseller and publisher for more than fifty years. Founder and editor of North Point Press, he is the Founding Editor and Editorial Director of Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California.
Photo Credit: Jane Vandenburgh
Andrew Tonkovich is the longtime editor of the West Coast literary arts journal the Santa Monica Review and founding editor of Citric Acid, an online Orange County, California quarterly. He hosts a weekly books show, Bibliocracy Radio, on Pacifica’s KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California. He co-edited the landmark anthology Orange County: A Literary Field Guide with Lisa Alvarez and is the author of two collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. His short stories, book reviews, essays, and journalism have appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Faultline, Solstice, Journal of the Plague Years, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Best American Nonrequired Reading. For many years he was a regular contributor to the OC Weekly. [F]
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Oscar Villalon is the Editor of ZYZZYVA, the award-winning California literary journal. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, The Approach, Virginia Quarterly Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. A former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, he has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction three times, including once as jury chair, and has served as a judge for the National Book Awards. He lives with his family in San Francisco, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers.