After this year's NBCC membership meeting, NBCC board member Walton Muyumba led a conversation about racial and gender representation in book reviewing. Among the questions engaged were: 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?
The panel was held at the Center for Fiction on May 27, 2015. Panelists left to right: Cate Marvin, poet and co-founder of VIDA; Miriam Markowitz, NBCC board member and deputy literary editor of The Nation; Alexander Chee, fiction writer and book reviewer; Hawa Allan, contributing editor at Tricyle magazine; and Parul Sehgal, former NBCC board member and editor at The New York Times Book Review.