The 2017 Tournament of Books Judges

Bim Adewunmi is a British journalist based in New York. She’s a senior culture writer at BuzzFeed and a columnist at the Guardian. She frequently laments the lack of a British “High Street” culture in America.

Aaron Bady is a writer in Oakland, Calif., a bookseller at Diesel bookstore, and an editor at The New Inquiry.

Kirstin Butler is social media editor for The Millions by day and Slate by night. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is either working on her novel, procrastinating on Twitter, or walking her dog, Momo.

Susannah Cahalan is a journalist whose bestselling memoir Brain on Fire chronicled her experience with a rare brain disease. Her next book The Committed, out in 2018, explores the modern history of psychiatry though the true stories of volunteers who went undercover as patients in the 1970s.

Steph Cha is the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough. She’s the noir editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. She lives in her native city of Los Angeles with her husband and two basset hounds.

Will Chancellor is the author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (Harper, 2014). He is currently working on his second novel, To Test the Meaning of Certain Dreams.

Nicole Chung, an editor at Catapult and the former managing editor of The Toast, has written for the New York Times, Hazlitt, BuzzFeed, the Atlantic, ELLE, and other publications. She is working on a book about adoption.

Jason Diamond is the author of the memoir Searching for John Hughes, the sports editor at Rollingstone.com, and the founder of Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and been given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. He is the editor of BuzzFeed Books and co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes).

V.V. Ganeshananthan, a novelist and journalist, is the author of Love Marriage (Random House, 2008), which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.

Rahawa Haile is an Eritrean-American writer of short stories and essays who hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2016.

Reyhan Harmanci is an editor at First Look Media. Previously, she put in time at Atlas Obscura, Fast Company, Modern Farmer, and BuzzFeed.

Lili Loofbourow is a writer who lives in Oakland, Calif. She’s the culture critic at The Week.

Caille Millner is the author of a memoir, The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification, which won the Barnes & Noble Emerging Author Award. Her fiction has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Joyland, and Best American Short Stories 2016.

Miranda Popkey is a writer. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, the Paris Review Daily, the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, The Hairpin, and The Awl. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis.

Pamela Ribon writes books (You Take It From Here, Why Girls Are Weird), movies (Moana, Smurfs: The Lost Village), comics (Slam!, Rick and Morty), and TV. She’s currently co-writing Untitled Wreck-It Ralph Sequel and was just named one of Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch. Her comedic memoir Notes to Boys (And Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public), which NPR called “brain-breakingly funny,” is now out in paperback. She’s known as a pioneer in the blogging world with her successful website pamie.com, where she launched such viral essays as “How I Might Have Just Become the Newest Urban Legend” and “Barbie Fucks it Up Again,” the latter of which led to #FeministHackerBarbie, a revamp of Mattel’s products and marketing for Barbie, and the creation of Game Developer Barbie as “Career of the Year.”

TMN 2017 Reader Judge Tim Rinehart is a Botanist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, where he uses molecular genetics to improve hydrangeas and other flowering plants. When he’s not in the lab sequencing genomes and editing genes, he’s writing federal reports. He is one of 2,818 people living in Poplarville, Miss., along with his wife and five children.