Meet The 2025 Judges
Jane Ciabattari
Jane Ciabattari served as National Book Critics Circle president from 2008-2011, and is currently NBCC Co-VP Events. She is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection "Stealing the Fire," an Iowa Short Fiction finalist. Her short stories have been published widely and honored with three Pushcart Prize "special mentions,” an Editors' Choice Award for innovation, and multiple fiction fellowships (New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, VCCA). She was Life of Letters Lecturer at Bennington's Graduate Writing Seminars, is a columnist for Lit Hub, and has contributed regularly to BBC Culture, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and as Intelligence Report columnist for PARADE. Her cultural criticism has appeared in publications like The New York Times Book Review, the Paris Review and The Guardian. Ciabattari was born and raised in Emporia, Kansas, and is based in Sonoma County, California.
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.
C.J. Farley
C.J. Farley was born in Kingston, Jamaica, raised in Brockport, New York, and graduated from Harvard, where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. His novel “Around Harvard Square” won an NAACP Image Award in 2020. He’s the author of four other novels: “Game World,” “My Favorite War,” “Kingston by Starlight,” and “Zero O'Clock.” Farley’s nonfiction books include the acclaimed “Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley” and the national bestseller “Aaliyah: More Than a Woman,” which was adapted into a hit movie for Lifetime television. Farley co-wrote and co-edited the book “The Blues,” the companion volume to Martin Scorsese’s PBS documentary series, and was a consulting producer on the Peabody-winning HBO documentary “Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown.” Farley, a former senior editor for the Wall Street Journal and former music critic for Time magazine, has interviewed numerous world-famous musical artists and leading literary figures. Farley worked as an Executive Editor at Amazon Inc’s Audible, where he co-executive produced the audio documentary “Think Twice: Michael Jackson,” which was named the No.1 podcast of 2023 by The New Yorker. Farley currently oversees arts programming and development at PBS. His new novel “Who Knows You by Heart” will be published by William Morrow in Fall 2025.
Jessica Friedman
Jessica Friedman is a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, where she represents literary and upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, as well as literature in translation and select graphic novels. She is interested in distinctive voices and writing that challenges the expected–stylistically, formally, or otherwise. She has worked with national and New York Times bestsellers, as well as finalists for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and the International Man Booker. Her clients include Anuj Chopra, Alfredo Corchado, Vinson Cunningham, Danielle Geller, Heather Hogan, Carole Hopson, Daniel Xin Huang, Oindrila Mukherjee, Sabina Murray, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and Jeremy Tiang, among others. Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in English and an MA in the humanities, and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and dog.
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.
Parul Kapur
Parul Kapur, a novelist, journalist and arts critic, was born in Assam, India and grew up in Connecticut. Her debut novel, "Inside the Mirror," inspired by her experiences as a reporter in Mumbai, won the AWP Prize for the Novel, is a Foreward Indies Book of the Year award finalist, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the New American Voices Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, ARTnews, Art in America, Esquire, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Paris Review. She has worked as a press officer at the United Nations in New York and an editor at Travel & Leisure. Her award-winning short fiction appears in Ploughshares, Pleiades, swamp pink, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Hambidge Center have awarded her writing fellowships. She has an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Atlanta with her family.
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.
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.