Dan Sinykin
Keynote: Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature
Dan Sinykin is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English at Emory University with a courtesy appointment in Quantitative Theory and Methods. His first book, American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. His second book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, was published with Columbia University Press in 2023. His third book, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Johanna Winant, was published with Princeton University Press in 2025. He is at work on three book projects: on the rise of, and alternatives to, Zionism in the Pale of Settlement; on certainty and skepticism in academic disciplines (how little we know); and on a virtue ethics for the left (via close reading). He co-founded the Post45 Data Collective and co-edits the Culture Industries section at Public Books with Laura B. McGrath.
Editors/Publisher Panel:
Will Evans, Deep Vellum
Will Evans is the founder, CEO, executive director, editorial director of Deep Vellum Press. He oversees the administration and execution of all aspects of Deep Vellum’s operations and programming, from mission and vision to branding and marketing to strategy and fundraising to editing and accounting, and a bit of everything in between. He has an M.A. in Russian Culture from Duke University and he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture
Meg Reid, Hub City Press
Meg Reid is the Executive Director of Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she finds and champions new and overlooked voices from the American South, including Carter Sickels, Drew Lanham, Ashley M. Jones, and Anjali Enjeti. An editor and book designer, her essays have appeared online in outlets like DIAGRAM, Oxford American, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as Assistant Editor of the literary magazine Ecotone and worked for the literary imprint Lookout Books. She was a Publishers Weekly Star Watch 2021 Honoree. She loves literary nonfiction and braided essays. She lives in Spartanburg, SC with her husband, two cats, and a short-legged terrier mix.
Kathy Pories, Algonquin Books
Kathy Pories joined Algonquin Books as an editorial intern while finishing her Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies and teaching undergraduate literature. She acquires a broad range of fiction, primarily literary and upmarket, and select nonfiction, with a specific interest in stories from diverse perspectives told in a singular way. She has been with Algonquin for over two decades, during which she acquired and edited Gabrielle Zevin’s New York Times bestselling The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Oscar Hokeah’s PEN/Hemingway winner Calling for a Blanket Dance, Lauren Grodstein’s Read with Jenna book club pick We Must Not Think of Ourselves, Thrity Umrigar’s Reese’s book club pick Honor, Gabriel Bump’s Ernest J. Gaines Award winner Everywhere You Don’t Belong, Lisa Ko’s National Book Award finalist The Leavers, and Whiting Award winner Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls. She has also worked with Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Robert Olmstead, Daniel Wallace, Ayesha Rascoe, Michael Parker, Rebecca Lee, Bill Roorbach, Silas House, Nayantara Roy; and many more; her authors’ books have been finalists or winners of numerous prizes including The Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award, and the Thomas Wolfe Award. For seventeen years, she worked alongside Barbara Kingsolver as a judge for and editor of the winners of the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She designed and taught the pilot course on Publishing at UNC Chapel Hill.
Critics Panel
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small
Becca Rothfeld is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an editor at The Point. Previously, she was the non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post. Her essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, was published Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK in April 2024. The New York Times called it “splendidly immodest” and “exhilarating” and The Guardian called it “bracing and brilliant.” It was a New York Times editors’ pick and a New Yorker weekly recommendation. It was also one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, one of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2024, one of LitHub’s 38 Favorite Books of 2024, one of Mother Jones’s Best Books We Read This Year, one of the Prospect’s Books of the Year, and one of The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Non-Fiction from 2024. Rothfeld is also a PhD candidate (on indefinite hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard.
Ross Barkan, The Metropolitan Review
Ross Barkan is an award-winning author and journalist and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for New York Magazine. He also regularly contributes columns to Crain’s and The New Statesman. His latest novel, Glass Century, is out now. He is the editor-in-chief of The Metropolitan Review, a new books and culture magazine. His journalism and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Guardian, and the New Yorker, among others. Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid called him “consistently one of the most interesting and original writers of his generation.” In both 2017 and 2019, he was the recipient of the New York Press Club’s award for distinguished newspaper commentary. He now teaches journalism at NYU.
Joanna Biggs, A Life of One’s Own
Joanna Biggs is the deputy editor of the Yale Review and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, which was a finalist for the 2023 National Award for Arts Writing. She has written for the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Nation, the New Republic, Bookforum, Granta, the Paris Review online, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times. She was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2024. After working at the London Review of Books for fifteen years, she was a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine from 2021 to 2024. While at Harper’s Magazine, two pieces I edited, by Ian Penman and Rosalind Brown, were nominated for 2025 National Magazine Awards, in the “Reviews and Criticism” and “Fiction” categories. She was a recipient of a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation in 2020, and part of the inaugural cohort at the Willa Cather Writers’ Residency in Red Cloud, Nebraska in 2023. She was nominated to the National Book Critics’ Circle board in 2026, and has been a fellow of Grace Hopper College, Yale University since 2025. Her first book, All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, came out in 2015 with Serpent’s Tail in the UK. In 2017, she co-founded Silver Press to publish feminist writers, including Audre Lorde, Leonora Carrington, Nell Dunn, Chantal Akerman and M. NourbeSe Philip.
Scholars Panel:
Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction
Dan Sinykin is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English at Emory University with a courtesy appointment in Quantitative Theory and Methods. His first book, American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. His second book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, was published with Columbia University Press in 2023. His third book, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Johanna Winant, was published with Princeton University Press in 2025. He is at work on three book projects: on the rise of, and alternatives to, Zionism in the Pale of Settlement; on certainty and skepticism in academic disciplines (how little we know); and on a virtue ethics for the left (via close reading). He co-founded the Post45 Data Collective and co-edits the Culture Industries section at Public Books with Laura B. McGrath.
Laura McGrath, Middlemen
Laura B. McGrath is writer, literary historian, and data scientist. She has written on books, publishing history, and data for The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. Laura is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, she was the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. Her academic writing has been published inNew Literary History, American Literary History, Post45, CA: The Journal of Cultural Analytics, and the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020. She is Special Features editor of CA: The Journal of Cultural Analytics, founding co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, and the “Culture Industries” section editor at Public Books. A former Kennedy Fellow with the Smithsonian Institute of American History, her work has been supported by the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, and the Big Ten. Laura is the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (coming soon from Princeton University Press).
Richard So, Redling Culture
Richard Jean So is Rhodes Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He specializes in the use of computational and AI methods to study culture and the arts at scale, and increasingly studies the role that cultural and humanistic theory will play in shaping and improving AI systems. He publishes in both humanistic journals and science proceedings, such as Critical Inquiry, PMLA and ACL and PNAS. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP 2021).
Creative Writers – A Reading and Q&A:
Tom Comitta, People’s Choice Literature
Tom Comitta (they/them) is the author of The Nature Book (Coffee House Press), Patchwork (Coffee House Press, forthcoming 2025), (Ugly Ducking Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), SENT (Invisible Venue), First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of the 40 books he produced in four years. Their fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, Joyland, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020, with two poems in The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing, UK), an international anthology surveying the “rise of concrete poetry in the digital age.”From 2011-12 Comitta composed and conducted nine operas with SF Guerrilla Opera, a roving ensemble that gave voice to found texts at numerous sites around the Bay Area including the Civic Center BART station and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2012 Comitta staged National Novel Writing Night Month (NaNoWriNiMo), a futurist improvement on the popular write-a-novel-in-a-month contest in which they wrote, designed and published novels written in a night. In 2015 The Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland exhibited Comitta’s solo show First Thought Worst Thought, an interactive archive containing the 40 books Comitta composed between 2011 and 2014 as well as accompanying works in video, drawing, digital printing, window decals, and an original computer program. In 2017 The Walker Art Center and The Southern Theater commissioned Comitta and the performance duo Fire Drill to stage Bill: The Musikill, an experimental musical, at Minneapolis’s Momentum Dance Festival.
Camille Bordas, One Sun Only
Camille Bordas is a novelist and short story writer. In English, she is the author of the short story collection One Sun Only (Random House, 2026), and two novels: The Material (Random House, 2024), and How to Behave in a Crowd (Tim Duggan Books, 2017). Her earlier two books, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.
Anne Garréta, Sphinx
Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the collective. A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Anne Garréta, did her License de Lettres at the Université Paris 4 (Sorbonne), her Maitrise and her D.E.A at the Université Paris 7 (Diderot) before moving to the US and pursuing her PhD there. She has taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) before coming to Duke. She teaches regularly in France at the Université Rennes 2, and more recently at Paris 7 (Diderot). A writer, she has published half a dozen novels, starting with Sphinx in 1986, some of which have been translated into Japanese, Finnish, Spanish, Italian, German. Two of these novels have recently appeared in English and been reviewed in the London Review of Books, the TLS, Lambda Literary, Bomb magazine, Kenyon Review, etc.
Pas un jour was awarded the Prix Medicis in 2002; in translation (Not One Day) it was nominated in 2018 as finalist for 3 prizes (Lambda Literary Prize, Albertine Prize, and French-American Foundation Translation Prize). She was elected to the OULIPO [Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle] in 2002 and to the jury of the Prix Medicis in 2011.
