Meet The Judges
Aimee Agresti
Aimee Agresti is a novelist and entertainment journalist. She is the author of "The Summer Set," "Campaign Widows," and "The Gilded Wings Trilogy" ("Illuminate", "Infatuate", "Initiate") for young adults. She graduated from Medill in 1998. A former staff writer for Us Weekly, she penned the magazine’s coffee-table book "Inside Hollywood." Her work has also appeared in People, Premiere, DC magazine, Capitol File, the Washington Post, Washingtonian, the Washington City Paper, Boston magazine, Women’s Health and the New York Observer. Aimee has made countless TV and radio appearances, dishing about celebrities on the likes of Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, E!, The Insider, Extra, VH1, MSNBC, Fox News Channel and HLN. She lives with her husband and two sons in the Washington, DC, area.
Chandrahas Choudhury
Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer, teacher and journalist. He’s the author of three novels (“Arzee the Dwarf,” which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award, “Clouds,” and “Days of My China Dragon”) as well as a book of literary essays (“My Country Is Literature”). He’s also the editor of an introduction to India for the literary-minded traveler: “India, A Traveler's Literary Companion.” He writes about literature, politics, travel and food for a range of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, The National and EnRoute. Between 2011-2015, he wrote a weekly column on India for Bloomberg Opinion; and he was also the Fiction & Poetry editor of the Indian monthly The Caravan over those years. He was a writing mentor at the Summer Institute of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa between 2020-2022, and part of the Faculty at The Creative Arts Academy, Kolkata.
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, and a British Fantasy Award, 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 graduated from Medill in 1987. 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. Before becoming an author, Due worked as a journalist and columnist at the Miami Herald, where she wrote a piece that was part of a Pulitzer-winning series of articles on Hurricane Andrew.
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.
Susan Lehman
Susan Lehman is an author, communications consultant, and a former editor at the New York Times. She is the author of "Are Snakes Necessary?", a novel she co-authored with Brian De Palma. As a book, magazine and web editor, her writing about law, culture and travel has appeared in a range of publications, including The Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Vogue, The New Yorker and SPY Magazine. As deputy editor of The New York Times Sunday Review, she helped shape the Times’ weekly opinion section, edited Times Insider, and hosted that section’s weekly podcast, “Inside the Times.” An attorney by training, she also served as communications director at the Brennan Center for Justice and has ghostwritten and edited books by many prominent lawyers. She is currently based in New York.
Ed Lin
Ed Lin is a New York author of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, and the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. He is also the managing editor of Barrons.com. His books include “Waylaid,” and a mystery trilogy set in New York’s Chinatown in the ‘70s: “This Is a Bust,” “Snakes Can’t Run” and “One Red Bastard.” “Ghost Month,” published by Soho Crime, is a Taipei-based mystery. “Incensed,” “99 Ways to Die,” and “Death Doesn’t Forget” continue that series. “David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College,” his first YA novel, was published by Kaya Press in October 2020. Lin lives in Brooklyn with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung, and son.
Waubgeshig Rice
Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation. He has written four fiction titles, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies. His breakthrough novel, "Moon of the Crusted Snow," was published in 2018 and became a national bestseller. The sequel, "Moon of the Turning Leaves," was published in October 2023. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002, and spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist and radio host. He left CBC in 2020 to focus on his literary career. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and three sons.
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.
Doug Seibold
Doug Seibold has worked in trade, educational, and nonprofit publishing and media for 40 years as a writer, editor, educator, and publisher. After founding Agate in 2002, he started Agate Development in 2005, acquired Surrey Books in 2006, created the company’s Agate Digital and Midway Books imprints in 2012, and launched Agate Publishing Academy in 2023. Among the hundreds of authors Agate has published are winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Kirkus Prize, the James Beard Award, the Caldecott Honor, the Newbery Honor, and many other literary awards.
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 The Studios of Key West among other places.
Mackenzie Brady Watson
Mackenzie Brady Watson has been an agent with the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency since 2016. Previously, she was an agent with New Leaf Literary + Media and Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. Her clients have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List, and have been winners of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award, and the ALA Carnegie Medal, and finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, various PEN Awards, and the Lambda Literary Award. Her clients include Margot Lee Shetterly, bestselling author of “Hidden Figures;” Olivia Gatwood, screenwriter, poet, and author of the forthcoming novel “Whoever You Are, Honey;” Bernice Yeung, journalist and author of “In a Day’s Work;” José Olivarez, educator and author of “Citizen Illegal” and “Promises of Gold;” Roxanna Asgarian, journalist and author of “We Were Once a Family;” and Sophie Lucido Johnson, New Yorker comic artist and author of “Many Love.”
Ken Wells
Ken Wells grew up with one foot in the Louisiana swamps, second of six sons of an alligator-hunting father and a Cajun-French speaking mother. From a modest start on his hometown weekly newspaper, he’s gone on to a journalism career that included twenty-four years as a feature writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal, a stop at Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and six years at Bloomberg/Businessweek. He’s authored six novels of the Cajun bayous, including the coming-of-age classic, “Meely LaBauve,” and three works of narrative non-fiction, most recently, “Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou.” Ken divides his time between Chicago and a little log cabin in the wilds of Maine. He’s an avid hiker, fisherman and photographer who dabbles in blues and jazz guitar, songwriting and cooks a mean Cajun gumbo. You can read more about Ken at his website www.bayoubro.com