Mark L. Clifford is the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation and a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University. Previously, Clifford was the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post  and publisher and editor-in-chief of The Standard. He held senior editorial positions at BusinessWeek and the Far Eastern Economic Review. 

Jerome A. Cohen is a professor of law at New York University School of Law and faculty director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute. Cohen also served as C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of eleven books, including People’s China and International Law: A Documentary Study.

Brian Donahue is professor emeritus of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. He is a farmer, historian, and conservationist, and the author of prize-winning books about the past and future of New England farms and forests.

​

“Brian Donahue makes a passionate and innovative case for the responsible use of forests as a place to ground a sustainable future.”

—Nancy Langston, author of Climate Ghosts and Sustaining Lake Superior
 

Jennifer Fleissner is professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism and Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

​

“In this brilliant, utterly singular study of the will, the modern individual, and modernity itself as problems, Fleissner makes a stunning intervention in the history and theory of the novel. It is no exaggeration to say that Maladies of the Will is on par with the achievements of Ian Watt and György Lukács. But Fleissner’s ability to combine astonishing erudition with deft diagnoses of critical impasses in our present strikes me as unparalleled. This book marks nothing less than a historical turning point in how we will read literature.” 

—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

​

​

Sara B. Franklin is a writer, teacher, and oral historian. She received a 2020–2021 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars grant for her research on Judith Jones, and teaches courses on food, writing, embodied culture, and oral history at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Aside from The Editor, she is the editor of Edna Lewis and coauthor of The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook. She holds a PhD in food studies from NYU and studied documentary storytelling at both the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. 

​

“Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this surprising, granular, luminous, and path-breaking biography.” 

—Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem

​

​

Susan Galassi is Curator Emerita of The Frick Collection and a noted expert on Picasso, Whistler, Goya, Monet, and other artists. She is the author of Picasso’s Variations on the Masters and co-author of Goya’s Last Works, among other publications.

​

“I read and shivered and tried, unsuccessfully, to think of other sub-three-hundred-page works of nonfiction that deserve to be called epic.” 

—Jackson Arn, The New Yorker

​

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is author of seven books, including Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History, and Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe. 

​

“[Herzog’s] book opens new vistas on the past and present of disabilities. . .. Pairing first-rate scholarship with a deep moral sensibility, it restores emotion – and, when possible, voice – to those previously deemed unworthy of life.”

—Corinna Treitel, Times Literary Supplement

Adam Higginbotham has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, and Smithsonian. He is also the author of Midnight in Chernobyl, which was the winner of the William E. Colby Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. 

​

“Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the dozens of major and minor players involved in NASA’s many successful, and occasionally catastrophic, space missions…. For cynical Americans, disaster buffs, and engineers, Challenger will be a quick, devastating read….It’s a universal story that transcends time.”

—New York Times

Frederic C. Hof has had a distinguished career with the US Army, Department of State, and the international consulting firm AALC, specializing in the Mideast region. His publications include Galilee Divided; Line of Battle, Border of Peace? The Line of June 4, 1967; and Beyond the Boundary. He also contributes to Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. 

​

“Israelis and Syrians not able to reach an agreement? Nonsense! When a knowledgeable, experienced, and tough-minded diplomat is involved, it can happen. Hof reveals the oh-so-close agreement he negotiated in secret. If not for the murderous rampage against his own people by Assad and the reluctance of the Obama administration to use its influence to stop it, the Middle East map would certainly be changed.” 

—Ambassador Richard L. Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State

Betsy Lerner is the author of the popular advice book to writers, The Forest for the Trees, and the memoirs Food and Loathing and The Bridge Ladies. She received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry. A publishing professional for more than thirty years, Lerner is a literary agent in New York. Her novel, Shred Sisters, was longlisted for a Debut Novel Award from The Center for Fiction and was selected as one of best 100 books by the New York Times.

​

“Wise to the woe and wonder of families and the bedeviling forces that shape them, Betsy Lerner’s masterful novel, Shred Sisters, delivers you through grief and devastation toward tremulous, exquisite hope.” 

—Bill Clegg, author of Did You Ever Have a Family

James Romm is the James H. Ottoway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and the editor of the Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press. He is the author of several other studies of Greek and Roman history, and his reviews and essays appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Review of Books. 

​

“James Romm has taken a little-known episode from ancient Greek history—the somewhat shady-sounding relationship between Plato and the tyrants of Syracuse—and developed it into a fascinating, richly detailed narrative. I may yet have to read the Republic.”

—Mary Norris, author of Between You and Me and Greek to Me

​

​

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book, The Age of Choice, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is also the author of A Revolution in Language; Common Sense: A Political History, and Democracy and Truth: A Short History

​

“Perceptive and nimble. . .. Rosenfeld has a knack for zooming in on seemingly ordinary objects, interpreting them in unexpected ways, and using them to reframe our picture of the modern world. . .. In The Age of Choice, she assembles an eclectic mix of everyday objects like menus alongside social practices like ballroom dancing, political debates about issues like voting rights, and high philosophy, reading those varied texts to piece together the story of the ideology of choice.”

—Andrew Lanham, New Republic

Hampton Sides is the author of the bestselling narrative histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, On Desperate Ground, and The Wide Wide Sea, which The New York Times named one of 2024’s Ten Best Books of the Year. He has also been a contributor to Outside, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications.

​

“Hampton Sides, an acclaimed master of the nonfiction narrative, has taken on Cook’s story and retells it for the 21st century . . . The result is a work that will enthrall Cook’s admirers, inform his critics and entertain everyone in between.” 

—Los Angeles Times

Caleb Smith is professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the American Imagination, The Oracle and the Curse, and Thoreau’s Axe. He also authenticated and edited Austin Reed’s Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Smith has written about media, politics, and the arts for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, n+1, and other venues.

​

“Anxieties over attention and distraction are nothing new but also, and more to the point, [Smith] raises an enduring cultural contradiction: like Thoreau, many of us feel distracted by shifts and accelerations in collective life—by new media, to be sure, but also by capitalism and its myriad crises—and yet, to combat these collective distractions, we turn inward and desperately try to become more disciplined, attentive individuals. . . . Smith is not the first to name this tension, though his ‘genealogy of distraction and the disciplines of attention’ might be the first to unearth its deep cultural roots.”

—Chelsea Fitzgerald, Los Angeles Review of Books

Jean Strouse is the prize-winning author of Morgan: American Financier and Alice James: A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Newsweek and elsewhere. Strouse has been a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and served as the director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

​

“Vivid social portraiture . . . Family Romance, a book as finely crafted as the portraits it describes, tells a story that is both specific and universal—about the yearnings for recognition and the tenuous rewards of achieving it.” 

—Benjamin Balint, The Wall Street Journal

​

​

Kevin West comes from country people with generations of commitment to growing delicious food. He is the author of Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving and also coauthored The Grand Central Market Cookbook and contributed to Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original. 

​

“The Cook’s Garden is an inspirational self portrait of a passionate cook and his garden plot. In a voice that is at once wise and personal, Kevin West shares his considerable gardening and cooking experience and the symbiotic seasonal joys to be had in both. Packed with welcome and useful information, simultaneously scholarly and down home, this book is an indispensable guide for gardeners and cooks alike.”

—David Tanis, author of David Tanis Market Cooking.

​

​