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Board of Directors

  • Erroll Photograph © Beowulf Sheehan www.beowulfsheehan.com

    Erroll McDonald

    Chair

    Erroll McDonald

    Chair

    Erroll McDonald is a Vice President and Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf. In his decades-long career in the industry, he has published, among other writers, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Wole Soyinka, Sandra Cisneros, Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, Colm Tóibín, John Edgar Wideman, Harold Bloom, Albert Murray, Fran Lebowitz, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Randall Kennedy, Margo Jefferson, Laila Lalami, Richard Posner, Nina Simone, Robert Farris Thompson, and Richard Pryor. A former PEN America trustee, he is Chair of the Board of Directors of The Center for Fiction and a board member of The Brooklyn Rail. He is a professor at Columbia and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Of Caribbean heritage, Erroll was born in Limon, Costa Rica, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Yale College.  He studied Comparative Literature in the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and holds an MBA from Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

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    Susan Restler

    Vice Chair

    Susan Restler

    Vice Chair

    Susan Restler is a longtime resident of Brooklyn Heights. Her first career was with JP Morgan where she led marketing strategy for the private bank. In 2003 she co-founded Knowledge in the Public Interest, a facilitator of online collaboration. The company developed a model of collaborative online professional development for teaching faculty that was acquired in 2018. Susan chaired the board of Packer Collegiate Institute during the conversion of the St. Ann’s church into the Packer Middle School. She is a Governor and Treasurer of the Brooklyn Heights Association and a founding board member of NY Focus, a digital investigative journalism platform that explores, in particular, issues that arise in Albany that have an impact on New York City. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University and an MBA from Columbia University. Susan and her husband Peter have two children.

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    Celia McGee

    Secretary

    Celia McGee

    Secretary

    Celia McGee is a Contributing Writer for AIR MAIL and a regular contributor to The New York Times on books, authors and publishing. She has been a publishing columnist for The New York Observer, an arts writer for New York magazine, and a publishing correspondent and book reviewer on National Public Radio. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The National Book Review and Town & Country, among others. A member of The Century Association, she is a former board member of The National Book Critics Circle. Raised in Montana and the Netherlands, she holds graduate degrees in American Studies from Yale University and a B.A. from Harvard in American History and Literature. She lives in New York City and Southampton.

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    Nina von Moltke

    Treasurer

    Nina von Moltke

    Treasurer

    Nina von Moltke is President, Director of Strategic Development at Penguin Random House U.S., providing leadership on key strategic initiatives and working with all publishing groups to help scope out content priorities and new business opportunities. Her role also includes oversight of the corporate author- and agent-centric functions, such as author contracts, royalties, and children’s subsidiary rights, as well as the Author Platforms group, comprising the Speaker’s Bureau, the Author Portal, podcasts, e-courses, merchandising, and licensing. She joined the company in 2002 as part of the Bertelsmann Entrepreneurs Program. Initially a member of the business-management team of the Crown Publishing Group and then part of the central Finance group, she was promoted to Vice President, Corporate Development in 2004. In 2010, she moved to the publishing side, overseeing the Audio group, Fodor’s and Living Language, in addition to leading the digital product development efforts in the ebook and apps channel. She was instrumental in merging the audio and digital-product teams after the Penguin Random House merger, and has led the audio group through a phase of tremendous growth. Nina studied philosophy in Hamburg and Berlin, Germany, and holds an MPA degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

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    Gabrielle Bamberger

    Gabrielle Bamberger

    Gabrielle Bamberger heads Gabrielle Bamberger Public Relations, a firm she has run since the late 1960s. She has developed and implemented PR programs and projects for a broad range of clients in the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds, most recently The Glaucoma Foundation, Arts Connection, Helen Keller International, Uniform Law Conference, and the Center for Jewish History.

    She serves on the Board of East End Hospice. Bamberger is a graduate of Oberlin College.

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    Dr. Sayu Bhojwani

    Dr. Sayu Bhojwani

    For over three decades, Sayu has activated change in nonprofit and government settings, founding and leading three organizations, and speaking and writing on how immigrants and women of color can shape the world we want to see. Born in India, and raised in Belize, she is a proud New Yorker who served as the City’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs.

    Her career as a social entrepreneur began in the 1990s, when she started South Asian Youth Action (SAYA), the first organization in the United States specifically focused on supporting youth who trace their ancestry to the Indian subcontinent. In 2010, she founded New American Leaders to support first- and second-generation Americans to run, win and lead in public office. In 2021, she founded Women’s Democracy Lab (WDL), to support women of color and Indigenous women, post-election.

    Sayu began her academic journey as an English major and remains passionate about reading and writing fiction. She holds a PhD in Politics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, is the author of People Like Us: The New Wave of Candidates Knocking at Democracy’s Door (New Press, 2018) and a TED speaker. She has been widely published in national news outlets and writes frequently on Medium and No. 1 Immigrant Daughter.

    She lives in New York City with her partner and teenage child.


    Photo Credit: Regina Fleming

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    David Bruson

    David Bruson

    In his current role as Director, Public Affairs at Nickelodeon, David Bruson works alongside on-air programming, brand marketing, business development and ad sales teams to integrate pro-social themes into Nickelodeon content. In addition, he connects Nickelodeon’s roster of on-air talent to philanthropic opportunities, as well as to Nick’s own signature initiatives. He spearheads the network’s corporate giving strategy, and manages key sponsorships with organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, GLAAD, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Natural History Museum Los Angeles.

    Before coming to Nickelodeon, David worked with renowned Australian entertainer Barry Humphries over the course of a Tony Award-winning season on Broadway with Dame Edna: The Royal Tour. In his role with Humphries, David acted as manager and collaborator, contributing new material for Dame Edna’s Vanity Fair advice column and as a recurring cast member on the final season of David E. Kelley’s FOX television drama “Ally McBeal.”

    David continues his association with the professional theatre by serving on the American Theatre Wing’s Gala Committee, devising programming and fundraising strategies for the Fall benefit. In addition, he sits on the Wing’s Grants Committee which provides over $100k in grants to theatre companies across the United States.

    Most recently, David was a guest speaker at Clemson University, lecturing on issues and trends in Event Management. He is on the Advisory Council for the Children’s Defense Fund New York, as well as a member of the Rosie’s Theater Kids Corporate Leadership Committee and The Lord’s Taverners in the UK. He is a founding trustee of the American Friends of Foundation il pomo d’oro launching officially in 2019. Apart from being an award-winning baroque musical ensemble, il pomo d’oro is official ambassador of El Sistema Greece, a humanitarian project to provide free musical education to children in Greek refugee camps.

    David studied theatre at the University of South Florida and is a Certified Protocol Officer. He lives in New York City.

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    Phong H. Bui

    Phong H. Bui

    Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1 (2007-10). He is also the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail and its imprint, Rail Editions. He was the host and producer of Off the Rail on Art International Radio (2010-15). He served on the faculty at Yale, Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, as senior critic for their Master of Fine Art programs. He has taught seminars in the School of Visual Arts’ graduate program in writing and criticism, and their program in photography, video, and related media.

    Bui has received numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts (2021), an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts (2020), the Jetté Award for Leadership in the Arts from the Colby College Museum of Art (2019), the Lunder Fellowship from the Lunder Institute for American Art (2019), the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Prize in Fine Art Journalism (2017), the Esther Montanez Leadership Award from Fountain House (2016), the Art in General Visionary Honoree (2014), the Annual Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003), the Eric Isenburger Annual Prize for Installation from the National Academy Museum (2003), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1995), the Arcadia Traveling Fellowship (1998), the Hohenberg Traveling Fellowship (1987), among others.

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    Danielle Ganek

    Danielle Ganek

    Danielle Ganek is an author whose novels (​Lulu Meets God And Doubts Him, The Summer We Read Gatsby​) have been translated into multiple languages. In 2007 she was featured in the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program. She and her husband, David, live in New York with their three children and three dogs. Together they run the Ganek Family Foundation and have been actively involved in New York institutions such as New York Presbyterian Hospital, the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Museum as well as their children’s schools.

    Danielle sits on the Visiting Committee for the Metropolitan Museum Department of Photographs and the Women’s Board of the Boys Club of New York and serves as Vice President on the Board of Trustees of the Southampton Fresh Air Home, a camp for physically challenged children. She is also on the board of the House of SpeakEasy NYC. She received a BA in English from Franklin and Marshall College. She is currently working on her next novel.

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    Nan Graham

    Nan Graham

    Nan Graham is Publisher and Senior Vice President of Scribner. She came to Scribner as Editor-in-Chief in 1994. She has worked in publishing since 1980—for five years at Pantheon Books and for ten years at Viking Penguin where she was the Executive Editor. Nan has edited writers of fiction, memoir, sociology, history and psychology, and her authors have won National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and other major awards. She has worked on many iconic memoirs, including Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up, and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History. Other non-fiction includes Andrew Solomon’s National Book Award winner, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. She has edited and published all of Anthony Doerr’s books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Her authors include Rachel Kushner, Annie Proulx, Amy Hempel, Monica Ali, Kate Walbert, Dana Spiotta, and Colm Tóibín. She edited Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach and The Candy House, and has worked with Don Delillo for over thirty years and with Stephen King for twenty-five years.

    She received her B.A. in English from Yale University in 1977 and an honorary doctorate from Marymount Manhattan College in 1997. In 2011, she received the Maxwell Perkins Prize from the Center for Fiction, and joined the Board shortly thereafter.

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    Anne Higonnet

    Anne Higonnet

    Author of five print books, numerous essays, two lengthy digital projects, and recent director of a website about the world’s rarest and most radical fashion plates, Anne Higonnet is a Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University. After receiving her BA from Harvard in 1980 and PhD from Yale in 1988, Anne has anchored her research and teaching on art since 1650, on childhood, and collecting. Her work is supported by grants from the Mellon, Howard and Kress Foundations, as well as Getty, Guggenheim, and Social Science Research Council fellowships. She is a recognized Berthe Morisot scholar and an award-winning teacher lecturing widely, including in the Metropolitan Museum’s Live Arts program. She is married to John Geanakoplos, the Yale economist and founding partner of Ellington Capital Management.


    Photo Credit: Karissa Van Tassel

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    Chiwoniso Kaitano

    Chiwoniso Kaitano

    Chiwoniso Kaitano is a champion of artists everywhere. Currently, Chiwoniso serves as the Executive Director of MacDowell, the nation’s oldest and preeminent artists residency. Prior to MacDowell, she served as the executive director at Girl Be Heard, a global NGO that advocates for social change through performing arts and storytelling in all of its forms. Chi is an avid traveler, having lived on three continents. She holds a law degree from the London School of Economics and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs. In addition to The Center for Fiction, Chi also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Originally from Zimbabwe, Chi lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, the political theorist Andrew Sabl and their children. Connect with Chi on Twitter @chiwonisok or Instagram @chiwoniso.

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    Dennis C. Krieger

    Dennis C. Krieger

    Dennis is a partner at Katsky Korins LLP, where he has practiced matrimonial and family law for more than twenty years following a period as a securities and commercial litigator at a large New York law firm. He has had a lifetime of involvement in literature. During college and law school at Berkeley, Dennis was a Teaching Assistant in various literature courses.  Later, he was the co-author of Skiing the Best, a Guide to Skiing in North America (Vintage) which became a best-seller and was a main Book of the Month selection (Quality Book Club).  Dennis is an avid reader of Graham Greene as well as British fiction between-the wars generally. He recently led a highly popular Center for Fiction Reading Group entitled “Graham Greene: Belief and Doubt,” which began as a live event and ended as a virtual one. He will teach another Reading Group this fall. A Proustian, Dennis has spent the last decade participating in the Center’s intensive Proust Groups as well as in the study of Proust at other institutions. Dennis is married to Alice Viertel, daughter of the late novelist and playwright Joseph Viertel.

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    Sarah Lyall

    Sarah Lyall

    Sarah Lyall is a writer-at-large at the New York Times, covering a variety of desks, including sports, politics, culture, media, and international. Previously, Ms. Lyall was a reporter in the London bureau of the New York Times, starting in 1995. Before working as a London-based reporter for the paper, Ms. Lyall covered book publishing for the culture section from 1991 until 1994. She was a reporter for the metro desk from 1988 until 1991, covering general news and other beats, including night rewrite, the N.Y.P.D., Long Island, and Albany. Ms. Lyall has also written for various magazines, including Vogue and Vanity Fair. She received her B.A. in history from Yale University. Ms. Lyall has two children and lives in Brooklyn.

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    Lloyd Lynford

    Lloyd Lynford

    Lloyd Lynford was the co-founder and CEO of Reis, a Manhattan-based database and business information firm that he led from 1980 until he sold the company to Moody’s in 2018. During that period, he grew the company from two employees to approximately three hundred, navigated from print-based products to internet delivery of analytics and decision-support to institutional investors, and took the company public in 2007.

    Lloyd previously served on the Board of The Center for Fiction from 2011 to 2017. During that time, he was involved in the marketing and sales of the organization’s 47th Street facility and advised on the acquisition of The Center’s current home. He also has served as an advisory board member to CUNY’s Writers’ Institute.

    In a prior incarnation, Lloyd worked in the theater, wrote and directed plays in New York and Boston, worked with Jerry Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theater in Wrocław, Poland and as an assistant director to Richard Foreman in Rome.

    For parts of six summers, Lloyd has been a student in Marilynne Robinson’s master class in fiction at the New York State Writers Institute. He has published fiction in Granta. Lloyd grew up in the Hudson Valley, graduated from St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and magna cum laude from Brown University.

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    Liese Mayer

    Liese Mayer

    Liese Mayer is a book editor who has worked at Bloomsbury Publishing, Scribner, The Overlook Press, Little, Brown and Company, and Grove/Atlantic. Born in London, Liese grew up between New York and the UK, and she began her publishing career at the Argentine publisher Santillana, while living in Buenos Aires. With a particular interest in overlooked voices, Liese’s career has spanned both corporate and independent publishing. She has edited a number of celebrated writers, including Tom Perrotta, Miriam Toews, Susanna Clarke, Melissa Febos, Nora Krug, Ada Ferrer, and Edmund White. She and her husband, author Stefan Merrill Block, are co-owners of Skate Time, a roller-skating rink and community center in Accord, NY.

    Liese lives between the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

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    Camille McDuffie

    Camille McDuffie

    Camille McDuffie is a veteran of the publishing industry, who started her career at Viking Press as a member of the publicity team. There she worked with a range of authors from Stephen King and Gail Godwin to poet John Ashbery. After Viking, she joined Lynn Goldberg’s literary public relations firm and handled campaigns for bestselling authors, first novelists, and newsmaking nonfiction works (the firm’s name was changed to Goldberg McDuffie Communications). Among her most noted projects there was the launch of Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton and her long relationships with novelists Jodi Picoult and Alice Hoffman. She also handled public relations for the National Book Awards, The Whiting Writers’ Awards, and the New Yorker magazine. In 2014, she became Publisher of Columbia Global Reports, a new imprint out of Columbia University under the direction of Nicholas Lemann. Since its founding, CGR has published 43 works of short nonfiction for the general reader. Camille is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the NYU Publishing Institute.

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    Calvert D. Morgan, Jr.

    Calvert D. Morgan, Jr.

    Calvert Morgan is Vice President and Executive Editor at Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. His bestselling and award-winning projects have included Brandon Taylor’s Real Life and The Late Americans, Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji and Dear Senthuran. Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust and The Book of Joan, Kate Zambreno’s Drifts and The Light Room, Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds!, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins and We Live in Water, and Edward Carey’s Little and Edith Holler. Other authors he has worked with include Roxane Gay, Lauren Redniss, Esmé Weijun Wang, Blake Butler, Tom Piazza, Stanley Crouch, and Jerry Saltz. Previously Editorial Director of Harper Perennial, Cal founded the fiction site, Fifty-Two Stories, where he published new fiction by Mary Gaitskill, Neil Gaiman, Kevin Wilson, Amity Gaige, Catherine Lacey, Emma Straub, Marcy Dermansky, Kelli Jo Ford, and others, and edited the anthology Forty Stories, featuring new work by Roxane Gay, Mitchell S. Jackson, Brandon Hobson, Jamie Quatro, and more.

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    Susanna Porter

    Susanna Porter

    Susanna Porter is Vice President and Executive Editor in the Random House Publishing Group division of Penguin Random House. Among the bestselling and award-winning books she has acquired and published are novels such as The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate, Ill Will by Dan Chaon, Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, and nonfiction works such as The Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts, winner of the PEN Award for research nonfiction, Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, Untangled, winner of a Books for a Better Life Award, Citizens of London and Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson and A World On Fire by Amanda Foreman. She has also worked with Alison Weir, Arundhati Roy, John Burnham Schwartz, Nicholson Baker, Sarah Dunant, A.S. Byatt, Anne Perry and John Gribbin.

    After receiving a B.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania, she joined Random House in 1978 in the subsidiary rights department. Spending five years in London in the 1980s she worked for Chatto & Windus and then Hamish Hamilton as rights director. Returning to New York in 1989 she joined Bantam Books as a senior editor, and rejoined Random House as a senior editor in 1991. She now primarily acquires for Ballantine Books. Susanna and her husband James Clark have two children and live in Manhattan.

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    Shannon Rose Selden

    Shannon Rose Selden

    Shannon Rose Selden is a litigation partner at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, where she leads the firm’s Asset Management Litigation Practice and is a member of the firm’s Commercial Litigation and Private Equity groups. Ms. Selden represents hedge fund and private equity clients as plaintiffs and defendants in complex, high-stakes litigation of all kinds, including securities, contract, corporate governance, fiduciary, financing, and debt restructuring disputes. She is recommended by The Legal 500 US, and has been recognized as a Law360 “MVP” for Asset Management, one of the “Top 250 Women in Litigation” and a “Litigation Star” by Benchmark Litigation, and one of Crain’s “Notable Women in Law.” Ms. Selden is on the Board of the National Center of Law & Economic Justice, and has an active pro bono practice focused on women’s reproductive rights. She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Amherst College, and is a graduate of Yale Law School.

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    Dennis Williams

    Dennis Williams

    Dennis Williams is Senior Vice President​, ​Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Relations for Home Box Office, Inc., responsible for the company’s social impact initiatives and philanthropic strategies. A 20-year HBO veteran, Williams joined the company in November 1997 in Human Resources as an employment recruiter and later worked in Affiliate Sales and Affiliate Marketing.

    Williams is an advocate for equality in education and LGBT rights and serves on the board for The Fund for Public Schools, Horizons National, and New York’s LGBTQ Community Center. A native of Kansas City, Kansas, Williams holds a B.A. in English from Hamline University.