Meet The 2026 Judges
Leland Cheuk
Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, most recently the novel “No Good Very Bad Asian.” Cheuk’s work has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and Salon, among other outlets. He’s been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Hawthornden Castle, Djerassi, and elsewhere. He is the founder of the indie press 7.13 Books and lives in Los Angeles. You can follow him on Twitter @lcheuk and at lelandcheuk.com.
Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Shirley Jackson Award (among others), and her books include “Ghost Summer: Stories,” “My Soul to Keep,” and “The Good House.” She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.” She is an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator, Steven Barnes, co-wrote an upcoming Black Horror graphic novel “The Keeper,” illustrated by Marco Finnegan. A 1987 Medill graduate, Due worked as a journalist and columnist at the Miami Herald before becoming an author, where she wrote a piece that was part of a Pulitzer-winning series of articles on Hurricane Andrew.
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is the author of eight novels, including the bestselling “The Bright Sword,” an epic retelling of the story of King Arthur, which was a Time, Vanity Fair, Kirkus, NPR and New York Times Best Book of 2024. He’s also the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Magicians trilogy — “The Magicians,” “The Magician King,” and “The Magician’s Land”—which has been published in thirty countries and was adapted as a TV show that ran for five seasons on Syfy. Grossman has written two acclaimed novels for children: “The Silver Arrow” and its sequel “The Golden Swift.” He also wrote the screenplay for the movie “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” which was a finalist for the Critic’s Choice awards. From 2002 to 2016, Grossman worked as a staff writer at Time magazine, where he wrote more than 20 cover stories. He’s written essays and articles for publications such as The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. He has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, Electric Literature, and the Harvard Advocate. He has degrees from Harvard and Yale and regularly gives talks and workshops at festivals and colleges, and in 2018, he was the Mary Higgins Clark Chair in Creative Writing at Fordham College. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.
Bruce Hunter
Bruce Hunter was born in Toronto, and fled the Canadian winter at the earliest possible age. He spent half a century, extremely enjoyably, as a literary agent at David Higham Associates in London. Past clients include John le Carre, author of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy;” Graham Greene, journalist and author of “The Power and the Glory;” Muriel Spark, author of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie;” and J.M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate and author of “Disgrace.” He is a traveler, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a walker, especially in France and Spain. He was Treasurer of the Royal Literary Fund for 21 years.
Barbara Jones
Barbara Jones was an editor for more than thirty years, first in magazines (Grand Street, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue, Real Simple, More Magazine) and later in books (as editorial director at Hyperion Books and as a longtime executive editor at Henry Holt). As a magazine editor, she worked with such writers as Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Elizabeth Gilbert, Christopher Hitchens, Lorrie Moore, Ann Patchett, Francine Prose and many others. As a book editor, she edited and published numerous bestselling as well as prize-winning titles, working with authors such as Paul Auster, Dan Chaon, Susan Choi, Deborah Copaken, Kelly Corrigan, Sebastian Faulks, Lauren Groff, Janice Hadlow, Rachel Khong, Lillian Li, and Julie Lythcott-Haims, among many others. She’s now a literary agent with the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, with a client list that includes Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Kate Axelrod, Charles Bock, Rafael Frumkin, Danielle Lazarin, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Karen Valby and others.
Aube Rey Lescure
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer whose debut novel, “River East, River West,” was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins (US) and Duckworth Books (UK) in January 2024. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, the Carol Shields Prize, the Maya Angelou Book Award, and the Stanford's’ Fiction with a Sense of Place Award. It was also longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions, WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Litro, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Off Assignment. Two essays she edited are anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2021, and four others were listed in Best American Essays Notables. Aube is the co-author of “Creating a Stable Asia” (Carnegie 2016) and the translator of “Le Système Économique Chinois Face à ses Défis” (éditions Nuvis 2017). She was a writer-in-residence at the Studios of Key West, Willapa Bay AiR, and the International Writers Workshop at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer and AIDS historian. Her twenty books include “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, NY 1987-1993” and the novels “Maggie Terry” and “The Cosmopolitans.” She holds an endowed chair in Creative Writing at Northwestern University and is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Alex Segura
Alex Segura is the bestselling and award-winning author of “Secret Identity,” winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and an NPR Best Mystery of the Year. He’s also the author of the acclaimed Pete Fernandez series, as well as the Star Wars novel, “Poe Dameron: Free Fall,” and the YA Spider-Verse adventure, “Araña/Spider-Man 2099: Dark Tomorrow.” In 2024, he published a sci-fi/espionage novel, “Dark Space,” co-written with Rob Hart; the graphic novel “The Legendary Lynx,” illustrated by Sandy Jarrell; “Encanto: Nightmares and Sueños;” and “Alter Ego,” a standalone sequel to Secret Identity. “Alter Ego” was an instant USA Today bestseller, featured in Cosmopolitan, Parade, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and described as “thrilling” by the Wall Street Journal. In addition to his prose writing, he has written a number of comics for Marvel and DC, including “Star Wars: Battle of Jakku,” “Spider-Society,” and “The Question: All Along the Watchtower.” With Michael Moreci, he is the writer behind the noir re-launch of Dick Tracy. He lives in New York City with his family.
Michael Taeckens
Michael Taeckens is the co-founder of Broadside PR, a literary publicity agency, where his many clients include Ada Limón, Min Jin Lee, and Abraham Verghese. Michael is also a literary agent at Massie McQuilkin & Altman, where his clients include Forrest Gander, Elizabeth McCracken, and Dina Nayeri, among others. He has worked in publishing since 1995, including stints at Graywolf Press and Algonquin Books, and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is the inaugural George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She is a Singaporean novelist, journalist, and the author of the novel “Sarong Party Girls” (William Morrow, 2016) and the memoir “A Tiger In The Kitchen” (Hyperion, 2011). Both books were international bestsellers. She is the co-creator and co-editor of “Anonymous Sex” (Scribner Books, 2022), which was also an international bestseller, and the editor of the anthology “Singapore Noir” (Akashic Books, 2014). The National Arts Council of Singapore has awarded her multiple grants in support of her writing. A 1997 Medill graduate, Tan has been a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, senior fashion writer at In Style magazine, and senior arts and entertainment writer at the Baltimore Sun. Tan has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, and Headlands Center for the Arts among other places. She is the Chair of the Peyton Evans Artists Residency Alumni Network at the Studios of Key West.