Ilan Stavans, PUBLISHER

Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast.”

Jennifer Alise Drew, SENIOR EDITOR

Jennifer Alise Drew is the senior editor of Restless Books. She has worked as an editor for numerous other magazines and publishers, including AGNI, Open City, The Huffington Post, Grove/Atlantic, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, and Aperture. She was a friend and editor to Hunter S. Thompson, spanning his two final books, and has published essays in The Craft of Editing (Routledge, 2018), The Iowa Review, Slice, The Chattahoochee Review,and others. She holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University.

Lydia McOscar, MANAGING EDITOR

Lydia McOscar is the managing editor of Restless Books. She entered the publishing world as trade sales manager for Artbook | D.A.P., a role she held for two years. Prior to that she spent a decade in retail at Brookline Booksmith, a longstanding independent bookstore in the Boston area. She worked as a buyer for frontlist art and poetry as well as backlist fiction, memoir, essays, history, nature, science, psychology, and religion. During her tenure she created sections for Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, disability studies, self-care, horror fiction, and short stories. Lydia also held positions at Brookline Booksmith as an events director and used book buyer.

Paulina Ochoa-Figueroa, EDITOR AND PROGRAMS MANAGER

Paulina Ochoa-Figueroa is originally from Michoacán, México. She has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature and Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her doctoral dissertation explores the translation practices of three women writers: Victoria Kent (1892–1987), Aurora Correa (1930–2008), and Valeria Luiselli (1983–). The project analyzes their literary production in different cities through the lens of translation theory and practice and argues for translation as the critical component in their role as activists. She works with English and Spanish and is actively involved with the Translation Center at UMass Amherst. Paulina holds a graduate certificate in translation and interpretation studies and has taught Spanish language and literature.

Annette Hochstein, EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Annette Hochstein served as president of Mandel Foundation-Israel from 2002 to 2010. Prior to joining Mandel, Annette worked at Jerusalem’s municipal planning department. She was appointed by Mayor Teddy Kollek as director of Project Renewal in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood. Annette holds an MA from the New School for Social Research in urban affairs and policy analysis. She was a Humphrey Fellow at MIT. She serves on the board of the National Library of Israel.

Alison Sparks, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, YONDER

Alison Sparks, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist. Her work focuses on children’s early language and literacy learning in diverse cultural and linguistic communities with a special interest in the role of parent-child conversations during storybook reading. Her research collaborations, in the United States and Latin America, include families enrolled in Head Start, teenage mothers in homeless shelters, and The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. She is a visiting scholar at Amherst College.