CREATIVE ADVISOR

James Wood is a literary critic and essayist. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He is the author of two novels, several books of essays, and a study of the mechanics of fiction, How Fiction Works (2008), which has been translated into fifteen languages. His most recent book, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997-2017 (2019), gathers his reviews and essays from the last two decades.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached, MD, MSc, PhD, is a tenured Associate Professor of Medicine at the American University of Beirut, with a secondary appointment in History and Archaeology and an affiliation with Harvard’s Department of History of Science. She is the author of ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (MIT Press) and co-author of Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton University Press). She has taught at Harvard and Columbia Universities, and her research has appeared in Nature Medicine, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Boston Review, and Le Monde. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, and others, and translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, and Japanese. She is co-editing Lebanon: Anatomy of a Collapse (Hurst Publishers) and is the founding director of AUB’s new program on Medical History, Ethics, and Politics. She has received numerous fellowships, including one from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Aminatta Forna is a novelist, memoirist and essayist. Her novels are Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones. In 2002 she published a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone, The Devil that Danced on the Water. The Window Seat, an essay collection, was published by Grove Press in 2021. She is the winner of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been a finalist for, among others, the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the IMPAC Award and Ondaatje Prize. Aminatta was made an OBE in the Queen’s 2017 New Year’s Honours list. She is Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University.

Mark Gevisser is an award-winning South African author, journalist and editor. His books include The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers (2020), Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (2022), and Lost and Found in Johannesburg (2014). His is the co-editor of The Revolution will not be Litigated: People Power and Legal Power in the 21st Century (2023), and the pathbreaking Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (1996). His journalism and criticism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Granta, and many other publications. He also works as a communications consultant in the political and non-profit sectors, and has been an exhibition curator, a non-fiction writing teacher, and a documentary filmmaker. He is currently working on a biography of Magnus Hirschfeld and Li Shui Tong, to be published in 2027.

Dan Gunn is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris. He is a novelist, critic, and translator with interests principally in twentieth-century European literature. His critical works include Psychoanalysis and Fiction: an exploration of literary and psychoanalytic borders (1988) and Wool-gathering of How I Ended Analysis (2002). His works of fiction include Almost You (1994) and Body Language (2002). He was co-editor of the four-volume Letters of Samuel Beckett (2009-2016), and is currently preparing a two-volume edition of The Letters of Muriel Spark. He is the Director of AUP’s Center for Writers & Translators and founder and Editor of the ‘Cahiers Series’, no.41 of which was published in 2024.

Alice Kaplan is the author of many books at the intersection of literature and history, including  The Collaborator: The Interpreter; Dreaming in French;  Looking for the Stranger; and, most recently,  Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris. Co-founder of the Yale Translation Initiative, former Guggenheim Fellow, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of the French Légion d’Honneur as well the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History (for The Collaborator),  she is a member of the Writers Council of the American Library in Paris and the Board of Trustees of the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Alice teaches literature at Yale University, where she is Sterling Professor of French. 

Photo copyright Hamza Ayadat 2023

Born in Ramat Gan in 1967, Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and film. His books have been published in over four dozen languages and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde and The New Yorker, among others. His awards include the Cannes Film Festival's "Caméra d'Or" (2007), the Charles Bronfman Prize (2016) and the prestigious Sapir Prize (2018). Over a hundred short films and several feature films have been based on his stories. Keret teaches creative writing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Since 2021, he has been publishing the weekly newsletter "Alphabet Soup" on Substack.

Hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation,” and by the Financial Times as “one of the great novelists working today,” Nicole Krauss is the author of the international bestsellers The History of Love which won numerous awards including France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, Man Walks Into a Room, Forest Dark, Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and the Wingate Literary Prize-winning short story collection To Be a Man. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories.

Photo by Goni Riskin

Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.  She lives in Los Angeles.  Her new novel, The Dream Hotel, was published in March 2025.

Hermione Lee is a literary biographer and Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She held the Goldsmiths’ Chair at New College from 1998 to 2008 and from 2008-2017 was President of Wolfson College, where she founded the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing in 2011. Her publications include biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard; critical books on Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth; and books on life-writing such as Biography: A Very Short Introduction and Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing. She was awarded the 2020 Bio Award for her contribution to the art of biography. She is currently writing a life of Anita Brookner.

Photo by Tom Pilston

Maaza Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and a recipient of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Literature. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by New York Times, NPR, Time, Elle, and other publications. Beneath the Lion's Gaze, her debut, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books. Maaza has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, DAAD, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Fulbright Scholar Program.

Ramona Naddaff is a professor in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley, where she specializes in Ancient Rhetoric Theory and the History of Philosophy and Literature. The author of a scholarly monograph, Exiling The Poets; The Production Of Censorship In Plato’s Republic, she has published multiple articles on Plato's theory of poetry and on literary censorship, among other topics. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on Flaubert's writing practices and philosophy tentatively entitled, Never Alone: The Making Of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.  Her commitment to undergraduate education led her to found and direct two programs at the Doreen B. Townsend Humanities Center: Course Threads and Art of Writing.  A founding editor of Zone Book, she continues there as an editor of titles in the  humanities and social sciences. She currently serves on the board of Robert Reich's Inequality Media.

Ira Sachs is a NYC-based filmmaker whose feature films include Passages, Little Men, Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On, and Forty Shades of Blue.  His short film Last Address, an elegy to a group of NYC artists who died of AIDS, has been included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. A Guggenheim, Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow, Sachs is also the Founding Director of Queer|Art, an arts organization that provides mentorship and support for queer and trans artists in film, performance, literature and visual arts.  His newest film, Peter Hujar’s Day, with Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, premiered at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals in early 2025 and will be seen in cinemas in the fall.

Olivia E. Sears is a writer, editor, and literary translator. She is founder of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, where she edited the journal Two Lines for over a decade and now serves on the editorial board of Two Lines Press. Her own translations from Italian focus on poetry by women from the past 100 years, from early Dada to the contemporary avant-garde, and she is currently translating poet and dramaturge Mariangela Gualtieri. She recently published her translation of a 1915 work of experimental poetry, Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms, by Italian painter and poet Ardengo Soffici. Also a musician, Sears has performed and recorded gamelan music from West Java with the ensemble Pusaka Sunda for more than 25 years.

Stefanie Sobelle is an editor and critic of literature and art. While her writing focuses predominantly on interactions between architecture and narrative, her interests have been expansive, ranging from Oulipo to desert poetics to cryogenics. She has published essays and reviews in venues including BOMB, Bookforum, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Words without Borders. Stefanie has also collaborated with her brother, theater artist Geoff Sobelle, on a production titled HOME (commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music), which has been touring globally for 8 years. She is currently a partner in Imaginary Places, a design studio that creates digital worlds for cultural institutions, and a professor in the English Department at Gettysburg College.