Pre-Tournament Playoff Round

Rachel Fershleiser heads publishing outreach at Tumblr. Previously she was the Community Manager at Bookish and the Director of Public Programs at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, where she now serves on the board of directors. She is also the co-creator of Six-Word Memoirs and the co-editor of four books, including the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning.

Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Sarah Schulman is the author of novels, nonfiction books, plays, and films. Her most recent works are Israel/Palestine and the Queer International and the novel The Mere Future.

Roger D. Hodge is the editor of the Oxford American and the author of The Mendacity of Hope: Presidential Power, Corporate Money, and the Politics of Corrupt Influence. Hodge’s essays have appeared in many publications, including Texas Monthly, the London Review of Books, Popular Science, Men’s Journal, and Harper’s Magazine, where he was editor-in-chief. He is writing a book about life in the West Texas borderlands.

Jami Attenberg is the author of four books of fiction. Her latest, The Middlesteins, was a New York Times bestseller and will be published in 10 countries. She has a Tumblr, too.

John McElwee works in the fiction department for the New Yorker and is a former literary agent at the London- and New York-based Aitken Alexander Associates. He contributes to special projects for The New Inquiry.

Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles-based writer and the author of three books, including the novels The Barbarian Nurseries and The Tattooed Soldier. He is currently writing an account of the 2010 Chilean mining disaster for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times.

John Green is the author of four novels, including the no. 1 New York Times bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, which Time magazine named the best novel of 2012. He’s also the co-creator with his brother Hank of the popular YouTube channels vlogbrothers and Crash Course, which have been viewed more than 400 million times.

Lydia Kiesling is a staff writer at The Millions, where she writes criticism, essays, and the semi-regular column “Modern Library Revue.” She lives in San Francisco.

ToB 2014 Reader Judge Greg Walklin is an Assistant Attorney General at the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office, where he practices in the consumer protection and antitrust division. He and his wife, Tiffany, live in Lincoln, Neb.

John Freeman is the author of The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read a Novelist. He teaches at Columbia University.

Roxane Gay is the author of two forthcoming books: An Untamed State and Bad Feminist.

John Darnielle is the lead singer of the Mountain Goats. His first book, Black Sabbath: Master of Reality, was published in April 2008, and he is currently working on a novel for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lizzie Skurnick talks about books for All Things Considered, The New Republic, Bookforum, and many other places. She is the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and the editor-in-chief of Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint reissuing YA classics. A collection based on her “That Should Be a Word” column for the New York Times Magazine is forthcoming in 2014.

Jane Hu is a writer, grad student, and Canadian. She has published at The Awl, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Republic. Currently, she lives in Montreal.

Jeff Martin’s books include The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles and The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. He has written for GOOD, The Millions, Salon, Poets & Writers, and Publishers Weekly. Jeff is the founder and executive director of the literary organization Booksmart Tulsa in his hometown of Tulsa, Okla.

Geraldine Brooks writes historical fiction about the bubonic plague and the Civil War because she finds the present too depressing. Her 2006 novel, March, got the Pullet Surprise, which is almost as good as winning the Rooster.

Kevin Guilfoile is the author of two novels, Cast of Shadows and The Thousand, that have been translated into more than 20 languages. His latest book, a memoir, is A Drive Into the Gap.

John Warner is the author of The Funny Man, and, as his alter ego, The Biblioracle, a weekly columnist for the Chicago Tribune Printers Row book supplement. He teaches at the College of Charleston.