Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 2 p.m.
The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th St., 2nd Floor
NBCC Panel: “Race, Gender, and Book Reviews”
NBCC board member Walton Muyumba leads a conversation about racial and gender representation in book reviewing. Among the questions we'll engage are: What do the VIDA numbers explain about the health of American publishing? Does the American reading public actually benefit from gender and racial parity in publishing? And should book review editors and book reviewers worry about sociological concerns like gender and racial diversity?
Walton Muyumba, moderator
Muyumba's essays and reviews have appeared in Oxford American, The Crisis, NPR Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He’s the author of “The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism” (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009). He is an associate professor of American and African Diaspora literature in the English Department at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Hawa Allan, panelist
Allen writes fiction and criticism. Her essays have appeared in “Best African American Essays” and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. She’s published fiction in Transition: An International Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Amazon's literary magazine, Day One, and the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement, Printers Row Journal. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Columbia Law School, Allan practices law and has been a fellow at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture.
Alexander Chee, panelist
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February of 2016. He is a recipient of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, NPR and Out, among others. He has taught writing at Wesleyan University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Texas – Austin. He is the curator of Dear Reader at Ace Hotel NY, and a contributing editor at Literary Hub. He lives in New York City.
Miriam Markowitz, panelist
Markowitz is deputy literary editor of The Nation and a board member of the NBCC. She was previously an editor of Harper’s Magazine and Viet Nam News in Hanoi. Her essay “Here Comes Everybody” examines some of the root causes of gender imbalance in magazine and book publishing.
Parul Sehgal, panelist
Sehgal is an editor at the New York Times Book Review. She is the recipient of the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, and her work appears in the New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Tin House, and the Literary Review, among other publications. She has been a speaker at TED and is currently teaching at Columbia University.