Christine Bollow is the co-owner and director of programs for Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Maryland. She is a 2022 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree, graduate of Barnard College, and currently serves on the American Bookseller Association’s DEI Committee. Christine is passionate about championing books by marginalized authors both at Loyalty and on her Bookstagram account, @readingismagical.
Jeffrey Burke is a fiction reviewer for Kirkus and has worked as an editor at Harper’s magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg News. He has reviewed books for Harper’s, the WSJ, Bloomberg, the New York Times, Newsday, and the Mail on Sunday. He lives with his wife and a cat named Pandora in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Hannah Bae is a Korean American freelance journalist, nonfiction writer, and illustrator who is at work on a memoir about what it takes to build a beautiful adult life after healing from childhood trauma. She is a 2024 grantee of the New York State Council on the Arts, a 2021 and 2022 Peter Taylor Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, and the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. You can find her work in anthologies such as Our Red Book and (Don’t) Call Me Crazy and online at Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s the Margins, Catapult, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other outlets.
Mary Ann Gwinn writes about books and authors for Kirkus Reviews, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other publications. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, she was the book editor of the Seattle Times from 1998 to 2017, a judge for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the co-host of Well Read, a national books and authors TV show. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, Mary Ann lives in Seattle, where dozens of independent bookstores and two world-class library systems feed her lifelong books addiction.
Christopher A. Biss-Brown is curator of the children’s literature research collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia, overseeing a diverse collection of materials that include original artwork and manuscripts, a repository of literature, and a surprisingly large number of creepy dolls. During his career, he has worked in public, academic and special libraries. He received his M.L.I.S. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003 and his M.A. from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2013. A Kirkus children’s and YA reviewer, Biss-Brown is an active member of the Association for Library Service to Children, the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and the Guild of Book Workers. In his spare time, he is exhausted.
Dr. Michelle H. Martin became the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor in Children and Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington in 2016, and she was the inaugural Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina from 2011to 2016. With Tammy Mielke, and Sarah Layzell, she co-edited the forthcoming Song of the Land: Critical Perspectives on the Works of Mildred D. Taylor. With Dr. Rachelle Washington, she co-founded Read-a-Rama, a nonprofit that uses children’s books as the springboard for programming. She is a longtime children’s and YA reviewer for Kirkus.
The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews
Featuring 258 industry-first reviews of fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and YA books; also in this issue: the 100 best fiction and 100 best nonfiction books of 2024, author interviews, and much more
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