Reagan Arthur was named Publisher of Knopf Pantheon Schocken, a division of Penguin Random House, in February of 2020. In her previous position as an editor and publisher at Little, Brown, writers she worked with included Kate Atkinson, Megan Abbott, Joshua Ferris, George Pelecanos, Tina Fey, and Attica Locke. She grew up in Southern California and now lives with her family outside of New York City.
Michael Carlisle, a founder of InkWell Management, has been involved with the Community of Writers for many years. His fiction and nonfiction client list includes prize-winning as well as debut authors. A former director of the Association of Author’s Representatives, a not-for-profit organization of independent literary and dramatic agents, Michael is an active member of PEN. He directs the Nonfiction Program of the Community of Writers and serves on the Board of Directors. http://inkwellmanagement.com/staff/michael-v.-carlisle
Joy Johannessen has been an editor at Chelsea House, Grove Press, and Oxford University Press; a senior editor at HarperCollins Publishers; and the executive editor of Delphinium Books. She has worked with hundreds of writers, among them Rabih Alameddine, Dorothy Allison, Amy Bloom, Harold Bloom, Michael Cunningham, Larry Kramer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur Miller, Ralph Nader, and Héctor Tobar. She is the co-editor, with Roxanne Coady, of The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them. She currently freelances.
BJ Robbins established her Los Angeles-based agency in 1992 after a multi-faceted career in book publishing in NY, first in publicity at Simon & Schuster and later as Marketing Director and then Senior Editor at Harcourt. Her agency represents fiction and nonfiction and clients include award-winning and NY Times bestselling authors Max Byrd, James Donovan, Nafisa Haji, John Hough, Jr. Stephen Graham Jones, Tom Lutz, Renee Swindle, J. Maarten Troost, Mary Volmer, and the late James D. Houston. www.bjrobbinsliterary.com
Cindy Spiegel is the CEO of Spiegel & Grau, an independent publisher. Previously, she co-founded Spiegel & Grau as an imprint of Random House, and before that was a founding editor, and later co-publisher, of Riverhead Books. As an editor, she launched the writing careers of James McBride, Khaled Hosseini, Bryan Stevenson, Gary Shteyngart, Chang-rae Lee, Kathleen Norris, Alex Garland, and ZZ Packer, among many others, and has also edited books by, among many others, Harold Bloom, Sara Gruen, Yuval Noah Harari, Anne Lamott, Jill Lepore, Yann Martel, Dan Pink, Sidney Poitier, Steven Rinella, Lily Tuck, and Ari Shavit.
Andrew Tonkovich edits the West Coast literary arts journal Santa Monica Review and hosts a weekly books show and podcast, Bibliocracy Radio, on KPFK (90.7 FM) in Southern California. His essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in the OC Weekly, Faultline, Juked, The Rattling Wall, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is the co-editor with Lisa Alvarez of Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday), author of a comic novella collection, The Dairy of Anne Frank, and a forthcoming short story collection. He teaches writing at UC Irvine, where he works with the union representing Librarians and Lecturers.
Oscar Villalon is the managing editor of ZYZZYVA. His writing has been published in several publications, including Freeman’s, Zocalo, The Believer, and Lit Hub. He lives in San Francisco.
