The Washington Post’s Book World is excited to announce several distinguished contributing writers whose work will appear in its pages. This group of contributors will continue the ongoing revitalization of the section, writing reviews and essays about current events and politics, history, literature, the arts, pop culture and more.
One year ago, The Post revived its beloved standalone books section, which had last appeared in print in 2009. The revival was strengthened with the additions of Sophia Nguyen as a news and features reporter and Becca Rothfeld as The Post’s nonfiction book critic, joining our longtime esteemed fiction critic Ron Charles and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Dirda.
The contributions of these brilliant thinkers will offer diverse, complex commentary dedicated to the continued reinvigoration of this essential line of coverage.
MEET THE TEAM:
- Jane Hu is a critic whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The Nation, Harper’s and elsewhere. She is a Humanities Society of Fellows postdoctoral candidate at the University of Southern California and will begin as an assistant professor of English there in 2024.
- Ayana Mathis is the author of the novels “The Unsettled” and “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.”
- Sam Adler-Bell is a writer and the co-host of “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast about American conservatism.
- Louis Bayard is the author of 10 novels, including “The Pale Blue Eye,” which was adapted into a film starring Christian Bale, “Jackie & Me,” “Courting Mr. Lincoln” and the young-adult novel “Lucky Strikes.” His reviews and articles have been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Salon and the Paris Review, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards.
- Margo Jefferson is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism who served as a book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. She is the recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize, and the author of the memoirs “Constructing a Nervous System,” which won the Rathbones Folio Prize, and “Negroland,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and “On Michael Jackson.”
- Quinta Jurecic is a senior editor at Lawfare, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
- Geoffrey Kabaservice is vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center and the author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”
- Christine Smallwood is a critic and journalist whose work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Bookforum and many other places, and the author of the novel “The Life of the Mind.”
- Sam Tanenhaus is the author of the biography “Whittaker Chambers,” which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His book “William F. Buckley, Jr.: His Life and Times” will be published next year. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and the Atlantic, among other places. From 2004 to 2013, he was the editor of the New York Times Book Review.
- Justin Taylor is the author of the memoir “Riding With the Ghost,” the novel “The Gospel of Anarchy” and the story collections “Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever” and “Flings.” His criticism has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, Bookforum and many other places. His next novel, “Reboot,” will be published in 2024.
- Jenny G. Zhang is a senior culture editor at Slate. She was previously a features editor and writer at Gawker and a staff writer at Eater.
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