Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program.

Alliah L. Agostini has marketed everything from iconic brands to scrappy start-ups, but motherhood helped her return to her first love: children's literature. She is the author of over a dozen released and upcoming picture books, early readers, and even a cookbook. Alliah and her work have been featured on Oprah Daily, TODAY with Hoda + Jenna, Essence.com, The Washington Post, and more. She strives to center stories that illuminate the diversity of the Black experience at the intersection of joy and truth.

Amy Larocca is an award-winning American journalist. She spent twenty years working at New York magazine as both fashion director and editor at large. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives with her family in New York and North London.

Anne Berest’s first novel to appear in English, The Postcard (Europa, 2023), was a national bestseller, a Library Journal, NPR, and TIME Best Book of the Year, a Vogue Most Anticipated Book of the Year, winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, and runner-up for the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was described as “stunning” by Leslie Camhi in The New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in The New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” in the pages of ELLE magazine. Her new novel, Gabriële (Europa Editions, 2025) is based on the life of Gabriële Buffet, whose extraordinary impact on 20th century avant-garde art and whose remarkable life have largely been obscured. Berest lives in Paris.

Anne Burt’s debut novel, The Dig, was an American Booksellers Association Indie Next pick, the Strand Book Store’s mystery selection for spring 2023, and the IndieBound.org Indie Next list’s lead “Thrills & Chills” reading group title for summer 2024. She is also a nonfiction writer and editor and a past winner of the Meridian literary magazine’s Editors’ Prize in fiction.

Benjamin Wallace is The New York Times bestselling author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar and The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto. He has been a features writer at New York magazine and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Bobbi Brown is a renowned makeup artist and entrepreneur, best-selling author, sought after speaker, beauty industry icon, and a hotelier. She founded two successful cosmetic brands: Bobbi Brown Cosmetics and more recently created the clean beauty brand Jones Road. She also envisioned and now operates The George Hotel in Montclair, NJ. Bobbi made the TIME100 “Most Influential People in the World” list and was also named one of Fortune's Most Powerful Women and Forbes' "50 Over 50" Most Influential Women. She was appointed to serve on the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and has been inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. She received a BFA from Emerson College and holds honorary doctorates from Montclair State University, Fashion Institute of Technology, Monmouth University, and Emerson College.

Candy J. Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. She is the author, most recently, of Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and A Town that Looked Away, which was recently named a 2025 honoree by the American Library Association’s YALSA award for young adult nonfiction. She also wrote Poisoned Water: How the Citizens of Flint Michigan Fought for Their Lies and Warned the Nation, named a 2020 top 10 young adult book by the New York Public Library. 

Carolyn Everson is a Senior Advisor at Permira, one of the world's largest investment firms and Boston Consulting Group.  Carolyn has decades of experience in senior operating roles in consumer facing technology and media companies.  She most recently was President of Instacart. Prior to Instacart, she was the Vice President, Global Business Group at Facebook (Meta) where she led a team of over 4,000 people in over 55 countries and was responsible for over $60B in revenue. She has been named to AdWeek’s 'AdWeek 50' every year since 2013, and in 2015, she topped Business Insider’s list of the Most Powerful Women in Advertising. She has also been included twice on Fortune’s '40 Under 40' list.

Cat Min is a Korean American author-illustrator, animator, and twin mom. Cat grew up in Hong Kong, where she spent most of her childhood drawing and making comic books out of printer paper and staples with her best friend. She studied animation and film at NYU Tisch and went on to complete the Illustration & Visual Storytelling Summer Residency Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is also a member of SCBWI, Women Who Draw, and the Society of Illustrators in New York. 

Christina Baker Kline is the Number 1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World. She is the recipient of the New England Society prize for fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. Kline has also written and edited five nonfiction books. Please Don’t Lie is her first thriller.

Claire Berest is the author of the novels Mikado (2009), The Empty Orchestra, Bellevue (2016), Rien n’est noir, winner of the ELLE Readers Grand Prize, and two works of nonfiction, Class Struggle: Why I Resigned from National Education, and Lost Children: An Investigation in the Minors Brigade. Her most recent novel is Artifices. 

Cleyvis Natera the author of Neruda on the Park, a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2022. She was born in the Dominican Republic, migrated to the United States at ten years old, and grew up in New York City. She holds a BA from Skidmore College and an MFA from New York University. Her writing has won awards and fellowships from PEN America, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives with her husband and two young children in Montclair, New Jersey. 

is a writer of humor and fiction based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, n+1, and Saturday Night Live. She is the co-creator and writer of the psychological thriller and Audible Original I Think You’re Projecting.

Dagmara Dominczyk is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama, and has starred in films, television, and on/off Broadway plays for the past twenty years. Dag was a series regular on the HBO hits Succession and We Own This City. She is the author of The Lullaby of Polish Girls and her essays have appeared in Huffington Post and in the book Pretty Bitches. She is currently finishing her second novel and working on a memoir. She is an avid reader and fierce library supporter, and lives in Montclair with her husband and two teenage sons.

Dale Russakoff spent twenty-eight years as a reporter for the Washington Post, covering politics, education, social policy, and other topics. From 1994 to 2008, she served in the Post’s New York Bureau, where she covered the NYC metropolitan area, including Newark, New Jersey. Dale Russakoff grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and began her career as a reporter for The Alabama Journal and later The Atlanta Journal. In 2015 she published THE PRIZE:  Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools, a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for a work of nonfiction. 

Dionne Ford is the author of Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing. She is an NEA creative writing fellow and the co-editor of the anthology Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, New Jersey Monthly, the Rumpus, and Ebony and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen's Club of New York. She holds a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from New York University. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of  City on Fire,  the novella  Field Guide to the North American Family,  and The Second Coming(out May 28).  In 2017, Granta named him one of the Best of Young American Novelists. His work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Haley Krischer  is the author of the young adult novels, Something Happened to Allie Greenleaf, The Falling Girls, and You Belong to Me, releasing on April 15th. Her first novel for adults, Where Are You Echo Blue, came out last summer. She's an award winning journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Marie Claire, Elle, and more. 

Henry Neff is the author and illustrator of seven fantasy novels, including the 5-book "Tapestry" series and  The Witchstone. His work has received critical acclaim, won multiple awards, and been translated into nearly 20 languages around the world. Henry lives in New Jersey with his wife, two sons, and a pair of rescue pups.

Ian Frazier is the author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father and Coyote V. Acme, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His latest work, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough, is his magnum opus: a love song to New York City’s most heterogeneous and alive borough. He graduated from Harvard University and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Jason Tanz is currently the editor-in-chief of at Lyft and before that worked at Wired for many years. His writing has appeared in many publication such as the New York Times, Esquire, and Fortune. He is also the author of the 2007 book Other People's Property: A Shadow History  of Hip Hop in White America. Jason also serves on the board of directors for the Montclair Public Library Foundation.

Jason Tanz is currently a writer at Salesforce and formerly the editor-in-chief at Lyft. Before that he worked at Wired for many years. He is the author of Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip Hop in White America.

Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore; she is now based between Singapore and the United States. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, and Nimrod, among other publications. Her first novel, The Original Daughter, was a Good Morning America book club pick and the New York Times Book Review declared it was “a book not to miss." 

Kate Tuttle is a book critic, essayist, and editor. A past president of the National Book Critics Circle and judge for the National Book Award, she edits the books pages of the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. A Kansas native, she now lives in New Jersey after stints in Boston and Atlanta.

Kate Zernike has been a reporter for The New York Times since 2000. She was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for stories about al-Qaeda before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. She was previously a reporter for The Boston Globe, where she broke the story of MIT’s admission that it had discriminated against women on its faculty, on which The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science is based. The daughter and granddaughter of scientists, she is a graduate of Trinity College at the University of Toronto and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. 

Kristine A. Lombardi has written and illustrated several books for children, including Lovey Bunny, Mr. Biddles, My Wish for the World and The Grumpy Pets, which garnered an International Literacy Association Children’s Choice Selection. She loves quirky characters and tender stories written with lots of heart. Her next book "Crouton" is coming from Random House in 2026! She lives and works in Montclair, New Jersey. 

Laura Sims is the author, most recently, of How Can I Help You, a New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Book Riot, and CrimeReads Best Book of the Year. She works part-time as a children's librarian in Millburn, New Jersey.

Lee Boudreaux is an executive editor at Doubleday, specializing in fiction. She edited James by Percival Everett and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, and also has the great pleasure of working with such writers as Claire Lombardo, Kate Atkinson, Margaret Atwood, and of course, Jemimah Wei.

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Very Nice, The Red Car, Bad Marie, Twins, and Hurricane Girl. She has received fellowships from the McDowell Colony and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. In March, she'll release her latest novel, Hot Air, which has been named a March IndieNext pick. She lives with her daughter in Montclair, New Jersey.  

Marissa Rothkopf Bates is the creator and host of The Secret Life of Cookies podcast. A professionally trained chef and journalist, she writes for The New York Times, Newsweek, Food52, and Publishers Weekly. Her first cookbook The Secret Life of Chocolate Chip Cookies was released in September. 

Mark Rotella is the Director of the Coccia Institute for the Italian Experience in America and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Montclair State University. In addition, he serves as thesis advisor in the MFA Program at Columbia University.

Formerly, Rotella was the Senior Editor at Publishers Weekly and Board Member at National Books Critics Circle. He is the author of several books, including Stolen Figs: And Other Adventures in Calabria and Amore: The Story of Italian American Song. He has published work in The New York Times, New York Times Book Review, The L.A. Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and more, and has appeared on outlets including National Public Radio, CBS’s The Insider, Entertainment Tonight, and ABC News.

Nicole Ban is a lifelong New Jersey resident who began her bookstore career at B. Dalton. After a longstanding tenure at Montclair Book Center, Nicole made the leap to Watchung Booksellers and quickly established herself as the store's resident problem solver and tech troubleshooter, as well as cookbook and mystery buyer. Nicole is also a graduate of the French Culinary Institute.

Olivia de Castro is a Dominican and Colombian children’s book illustrator. She grew up in Verona, New Jersey and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. In her art, she likes to capture the weirdness of everyday life, along with the humor and joy that comes with it. She has illustrated books such as How To Speak In Spanglish, Cute Toot, and Great Idea Malia! Her fourth children’s book, Sticky Hermana, comes out on October 28th. 

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalism professor at New York University and a contributing writer for The New York Times. She is the author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church and American TapestryThe Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, and a co-author of Unseen. Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Biographers International Organization, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the MacDowell artist residency program, and others.