Authors
People who write for Public Books.
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Ken Chen
Ken Chen is an Assistant Professor at Barnard College. His poetry collection, Juvenilia, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Louise Glück. His next book, tentatively titled The Encounters, follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism.
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David M. Higgins
David M. Higgins is associate professor of English and American Studies and chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Worldwide. He is also the president of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and he serves as a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Will McDonald
Will McDonald is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer originally from Minnesota. His work has appeared in The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, Stonecoast Review, and Fugue. He is currently at work on his debut novel.
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Nicolás Campisi
Nicolás Campisi is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times and the coeditor of Imagining a New Natural History: Latin American Cultural Production in the Anthropocene.
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Ria Banerjee
Ria Banerjee is a professor of English at Guttman Community College and consortial faculty in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Drafty Houses in Forster, Eliot, and Woolf: Spatiality and Cultural Politics (Palgrave, 2024) and has published essays in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, ELN, the Eliot Studies Annual, and elsewhere. She is…
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Dani Joslyn
Dani Joslyn is a historian of sex, science, and social movements in the long nineteenth century. She has written for Settler Colonial Studies, Encyclopedia of the American Left, Public Books, Spectre, Religion Dispatches, and The Revealer. She holds a PhD in history from New York University and is currently a term lecturer in American Studies…
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Rahim Kurwa
Rahim Kurwa is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Affiliated Faculty in Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author of Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing (University of California Press, 2025).
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Justin Akers Chacón
Justin Akers Chacón is professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego City College. His published works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Haymarket, 2018), Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican American Working Class (Haymarket, 2018), and The Border Crossed…
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Elizabeth Polanco
Elizabeth Polanco is a Toronto-based writer and the Interviews Editor of The Ex-Puritan, a Canadian literary journal. Her work can be found in Electric Literature, The Globe and Mail, Asymptote, In Review Online, Mildew Mag, and elsewhere.
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Christopher T. Bennett
Christopher T. Bennett is an education research analyst at RTI International, an independent scientific research institute. His research focuses on the ways that higher education policies can influence the trajectories of individuals and institutions.
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Dominique J. Baker
Dominique J. Baker is an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware. She is an internationally renowned scholar of higher education policy and a past recipient of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship (who understands the inherent irony in publishing an essay on fellowship winners).
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Mariela Olivares
Mariela Olivares is a professor of law at Howard University School of Law.
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William Lafi Youmans
William Lafi Youmans, JD, PhD is an Associate Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. He co-directed a documentary film about Alex Odeh, a Palestinian American activist who was assassinated in Orange County, CA in 1985. Who Killed Alex Odeh? premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and Berlinale. (Author photograph by Zizou Youmans).
