Katie Couric (@katiecouric) is an award-winning journalist, New York Times best-selling author and a​ co-​founder of Stand ​Up To Cancer (SU2C). Couric was the first woman to solo anchor a network evening newscast, serving as anchor and managing editor of the ​CBS Evening News​ from 2006 to 2011 following 15 years as co-anchor of NBC’s Today​ show. She also hosted a syndicated show and served as the Yahoo Global News Anchor until 2017. She has won a duPont-Columbia, a Peabody, two Edward R. Murrows, a Walter Cronkite Award, and multiple Emmys. In addition to ​The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives, Couric is the author of two books for children.

Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of novels such as The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), and Crossroads (2021), and works of nonfiction, including Farther Away (2012) and The End of the End of the World (2018), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.

USA TODAY bestselling author Sara Ackerman was born and raised in Hawaii. She studied journalism and earned graduate degrees in psychology and Chinese medicine. She blames Hawaii for her addiction to writing, and sees no end to its untapped stories. When she's not writing or teaching, you'll find her in the mountains or in the ocean. She currently lives on the Big Island with her boyfriend and a houseful of bossy animals.

Uwem Akpan teaches graduate and upper-level fiction workshops at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His fiction and autobiographical pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, the Nigerian Guardian, O, the Oprah magazine, etc. His collection, Say You’re One of Them won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa Region), the Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a 2009 Oprah Book Club selection. His new novel, New York, My Village, will be published by Norton in November 2021.

Kaia Alderson is a historical women’s fiction author with a passion for discovering "hidden figures” in African-American women’s history. Her specific areas of interest are women’s military history, popular music, women in sports, upper middle-class African-American society, and women’s international travel. She holds a sociology degree from Spelman College and a Master’s of Education degree from the University of West Georgia. She is an alumna of such respected writer workshops as the Hurston-Wright Foundation, Voices of Our Nation (VONA), Callaloo, and The Second City.

Mona Awad is the author of Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and The New York Public Library. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. Her first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her writing has appeared in TIME, The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at Syracuse University and lives in Boston.

Xio Axelrod is an award-winning, USA Today bestselling author. Xio grew up in the music industry and began recording at a young age. When she isn't writing, she can be found in the studio, writing songs, or performing. She lives in Philadelphia.

Brian Broome, a poet and screenwriter, is K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is pursuing an MFA. He has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University's Martin Luther King Writing Awards. He also won a VANN Award from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation for journalism in 2019. He lives in Pittsburgh.

Sandra Brown is the author of 69 New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 Seeing Red. There are over eighty million copies of her books in print worldwide, and her work has been translated into 34 languages. She lives in Texas.

Patti Callahan is the New York Times, USA TODAY, and Globe and Mail bestselling novelist of fifteen novels, including Becoming Mrs. Lewis and Surviving Savannah, out now, and Once Upon a Wardrobe, out October 19, 2021. A recipient of the Harper Lee Distinguished Writer of the Year, the Christy Book of the Year, and the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year, Patti is the cofounder and cohost of the popular web series and podcast Friends & Fiction. Follow her at patticallahanhenry.com.

Wiley Cash is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home, the acclaimed This Dark Road to Mercy, and most recently The Last Ballad. A winner and finalist for numerous prizes, he is a two-time winner of the Southern Book Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is the founder of the Open Canon Book Club and serves as writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their two daughters.

Jacqui Castle is an award-winning novelist living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her debut novel The Seclusion garnered her the title of the 2020 Indie Author of the Year through the Indie Author Project (a partnership between Library Journal and BiblioBoard). The sequel to The Seclusion will be hitting shelves on March 1, 2022.

Lauren K. Denton is the author of USA TODAY bestselling novels The Hideaway and Hurricane Season. She was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, and now lives with her husband and two daughters in Homewood, just outside Birmingham. Though her husband tries valiantly to turn her into a mountain girl, she’d still rather be at the beach. Learn more at laurenkdenton.com.

Cheryl Diamond is now a citizen of Luxembourg and lives between there and Rome. Her behind-the-scenes account of life as a teenage model, Model: A Memoir, was published in 2008. Diamond´s second book, Naked Rome, reveals the Eternal City through the eyes of its most fascinating people.

Lynette Eason is the bestselling author of Collateral Damage, Acceptable Risk, and Active Defense, as well as Protecting Tanner Hollow and the Blue Justice, Women of Justice, Deadly Reunions, Hidden Identity, and "Elite Guardians" series. She is the winner of three ACFW Carol Awards, the Selah Award, and the Inspirational Reader’s Choice Award, among others. She is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and has a master’s degree in education from Converse College. Eason lives in South Carolina with her husband and two children. Learn more at www.lynetteeason.com.

A native of Spain, Virginia Feito was raised in Madrid and Paris, and studied English and drama at Queen Mary University of London. She worked as a copywriter until she quit to write her debut novel, Mrs. March (coming from Liveright in August 2021). She lives in Madrid.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, M.J. Fievre, B.S. Ed is a long-time educator whose publishing career began as a teenager in Haiti. At 19 years old, she signed her first book contract with Hachette-Deschamps, in Haiti, for the publication of a Young Adult book titled La Statuette Maléfique. Since then, M.J. has authored nine books in French that are widely read in Europe and the French Antilles.

Susie Finkbeiner is the CBA bestselling author of All Manner of Things, which was selected as a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, and Stories That Bind Us, as well as A Cup of Dust, A Trail of Crumbs, and A Song of Home. She serves on the Fiction Readers Summit planning committee, volunteers her time at Ada Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and speaks at retreats and women’s events across the country. Susie and her husband have three children and live in West Michigan.

Ashley C. Ford lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana. Ford hosts The Chronicles of Now podcast where she has featured Lisa Taddeo, Carmen Maria Machado, Tommy Orange, Curtis Sittenfeld, and more. She also co-hosts The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio. Ford has written or guest-edited for The Guardian, ELLE, BuzzFeed, OUT Magazine, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, Allure, Marie Claire, The New York Times, Netflix Queue, Domino, Cup of Jo, and various other web and print publications. Her writing has been listed among Longform & Longread's Best of 2017. She has been named among Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 in Media (2017), Brooklyn Magazine's Brooklyn 100 (2016), Time Out New York's New Yorkers of The Year (2017), and Variety’s New Power of New York (2019).

Michelle Gable is the New York Times bestselling author of A Paris Apartment, I'll See You in Paris, The Book of Summer, and The Summer I Met Jack. She attended The College of William & Mary, where she majored in accounting, and spent twenty years working in finance before becoming a full-time writer. She grew up in San Diego and lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, with her husband and two daughters.

Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists.

Dan Grunfeld was a two-time Academic All-American as a member of Stanford University's men's basketball team. He played eight professional seasons in top leagues around the world, including a year in Germany, three in Spain, and four in Israel, with a brief stint in the NBA for the New York Knicks. Grunfeld received his MBA from Stanford, and his writing has appeared in outlets including Sports Illustrated, Huffington Post, Jerusalem Post, and SBNation.

Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling author of a dozen novels including The Book of Lost Names, The Winemaker’s Wife, The Room on Rue Amélie, and The Sweetness of Forgetting. She is also the cofounder and cohost of the popular web series, "Friends and Fiction." She lives in Orlando, Florida.

Anita Kunz is an acclaimed illustrator and painter whose work has graced the covers of the New Yorker, Time, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and many other mass circulation periodicals. She was named one of the 50 most influential women in Canada by the National Post. She was the first woman and the first Canadian to have a solo show at the Library of Congress. She has been appointed Officer of the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honor. She lives in Toronto. Her new book, Another History of Art, comes out in June from Fantagraphics. Connect with her on her website: anitakunz.com.

Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of A Wild Winter Swan, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, Mirror Mirror, After Alice, Hiddensee, and the "Wicked Years", a series that includes Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Wicked, now a beloved classic, is the basis for the blockbuster Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology, Emerita, at Harvard University. The author of The Heroine with 1,001 Faces (coming from Liveright in September 2021) and the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales and of The Annotated African American Folktales, among others, she lives in Cambridge, MA.

Kristi Chadwick is a Consultant for Massachusetts Library System, providing advisory and continuing education for multitype library members all across the Commonwealth. Kristi is also the columnist for Library Journal's Science Fiction & Fantasy reviews. You can find her discussing writing, books, libraries, and her love for coffee, chickens, and fountain pens on Twitter @booksnyarn.

Mattie Cook serves as the director of Flat River Community Library in Greenville, Michigan. She has been a library director for six years, and previously worked as a young adult librarian. She received her B.A. in Political Science at Michigan State University and Masters of Library
and Information Science at Wayne State University. She serves on many community boards, state- and national-level library committees, and has served as a social science reviewer for Library Journal since 2015.

Lillian Dabney received her MLIS from the University of Washington. She works as the Adult Services Librarian (indeed the only librarian) and is in charge of Library Operations at the Seattle Athenaeum, one of three membership libraries on the West Coast. She is currently serving on the ALA Notable Awards Committee for 2020-2021.

Rhonda Evans is the Assistant Chief Librarian of the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She supports the management of the Research and Reference Division’s diverse collections, that focus on people of African descent throughout the world. She is the author of the blog series, Black New York, which tells lesser-known stories of the Black experience across New York City and the outer boroughs. She is also an Assistant Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute’s School of Information, teaching in their Library and Information Science graduate program.

Liz French Senior Editor, Library Journal Reviews

Barbara Hoffert, Prepub Alert Editor, Library Journal

Lesa Holstine is the Collections Manager for the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library in Indiana. She reviews mysteries for Library Journal, and wrote the Mystery chapter for the 7th edition of Genreflecting. She was the recipient of the 2018 David S. Thompson Special Service Award, presented by the Bouchercon Board for life-long service to the mystery and crime fiction community.

Leah Huey is an Adult Services and Teen Librarian at the DeKalb Public Library in DeKalb, Illinois. She holds an M.L.I.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and reviews non-fiction that focuses on African American topics and issues.

Julie Kane received her MSLIS from Simmons College and an MA in English from Lynchburg College. She works as an Associate Professor and Head of Collection Services at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She currently serves on the ALA Stonewall Awards – Barbara Gittings Literature Award Committee, reviews for Library Journal, and is a columnist for College and Undergraduate Libraries. When not reading, writing, or librarying, she can be found knitting badly and yelling at continuity issues in streaming series with her husband and rescue hound Hobbes in Staunton, VA.

Marianne Paterniti, Book Group Coordinator, Darien Library, CT

Lynnanne Pearson is the Patron Engagement Manager at the Skokie Public Library. She has presented at several library conferences on readers advisory, genres, book discussions and eBooks, among other topics. She has also served on state wide committees as well as the Library Journal Best of Popular fiction subcommittee. She currently writes book reviews for both Library Journal and Booklist and was named one of 2020 Library Journal Reviewers of the Year.

Lisa Peet is the News Editor at Library Journal, and Senior Editor at the literary website Bloom (https://bloomsite.wordpress.com/).

Meredith Schwartz Editor-in-Chief, Library Journal

Stephanie Sendaula is Associate Editor, Library Journal Reviews

Pat Sheary, Head of Adult Programming, Darien Library, CT

Kaite Stover is the Director of Readers' Services for The Kansas City Public Library. She holds Master's degrees in Library Science and English Literature from Emporia State University. Stover is the co-editor of The Readers' Advisory Handbook (ALA Editions 2010). From 2004-2016, Stover wrote the "He Reads, She Reads" column for Booklist with David Wright and wrote, "Under the Radar" for Public Libraries from 2012-2017. Follow her on Twitter @MarianLiberryan and Instagram @KaiteStover.