BOARD OF DIRECTORS + OFFICERS
Janella Angeles DIRECTOR |
Courtney Burke DIRECTOR CLERK |
Maddy Colis DIRECTOR TREASURER |
Renee Combs DIRECTOR PRESIDENT |
Marisa Finkelstein DIRECTOR vICE PRESIDENT |
Janella Angeles is a YA writer represented by Thao Le at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. While she graduated from Emerson College with a B.A. in Writing, Literature, and Publishing, she always knew she wanted to be a writer first and foremost from the moment she got hooked on YA books and Harry Potter fanfiction. Since then, she’s been crafting fantastical stories and worlds of her own, and currently resides in Massachusetts where she's constantly reading and writing like she's running out of time, Hamilton-style.
Find her online: Twitter | Website
Photo Credit: Mei Lin Barral Photography
Courtney Burke is from a town with almost as many apple trees as people and currently resides in Brookline, MA. She always has her nose in a book (or two...or three), but when she’s not reading, she loves to travel, write, take photos, and play video games (badly). She graduated from Emerson College with a B.A. in Writing, Literature, and Publishing, and works as an associate editor at Page Street Kids.
Find her online: Twitter
Madeleine Colis is a YA writer from Chicago who lives in Australia and, of course, is a Boston Teen Author Festival team member—so she is perpetually time zone confused. She went to Northwestern University, where she studied English and began her YA fantasy series during her study abroad in Madrid, over espresso and sangria. She now lives in Melbourne: writing, learning martial arts, and failing to resist pretty foreign edition books.
Find her online: Twitter | Website
Photo Credit: Mei Lin Barral Photography
Renée Combs was practically predestined to have a love of words after being raised on a steady diet of books and Disney movies. She received her B.A. in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College where she cofounded the Boston Teen Author Festival during her senior year. After trying her hand at digital marketing in New York City, she discovered that she had left her heart in Boston and promptly returned. Renée now lives in Cambridge with her two pet rats, a hoard of books, and far too many owl-shaped things.
Find her online: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website
Marisa Finkelstein is nose-deep in words on a daily basis as an associate production editor at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. She graduated from Emerson College, where she majored in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and was a copresident and publisher of Undergraduate Students for Publishing (or lovingly shortened to “Pub Club”). If she’s not reading for work or leisure, you can find her curled on the sofa with her latest anime, manga, or video game obsession. Even though Marisa currently resides in New York, she can’t stay away from Boston and also fills her time as a staff member for the volunteers program at Anime Boston. She is the other cofounder of the Boston Teen Author Festival.
Find her online: Twitter
Photo Credit: Mei Lin Barral Photography
DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Courtney Burke READER RELATIONS |
Renee Combs operations |
Kayla Cottingham READER RELATIONS |
Julia Domenicucci MARKETING |
Clarissa Murphy Author/pub relations |
Anu Nande AUTHOR/PUB RELATIONS |
Meaghan O'Brien FINANCIALS + LOGISTICS |
Yara Reca-Vargas FINANCIALS + LOGISTICS |
Emilie Rodgers DESIGN |
Kayla Cottingham is a YA writer from Salt Lake City, Utah who enjoys cheesy love stories, long walks through the city, and traveling. She recently graduated with a B.A. in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College where she was the Editor-in-Chief of Stork Magazine. She now splits her time between working at her local library and interning for Page Street Publishing's YA department. She currently resides in Brookline, MA.
Find her online: Twitter | Instagram
Julia Domenicucci spends her days and nights thinking about books. During the week, she develops digital content for English textbooks at Bedford/St. Martin's (Macmillan Learning). She graduated in 2015 with a B.A. in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College, and often reminisces about the many hours she spent in Undergraduate Students for Publishing. Today, she spends most of her spare time reading. In her leftover spare time, she enjoys trying out restaurants around Boston, walking/hiking in pretty places, and hanging out with her large & literary-minded cat, Cedric.
Find her online: Twitter
Clarissa Murphy grew up on the island of Martha’s Vineyard where she worked in her first indie bookstore. There she discovered an immense and endless passion for being a Children’s Bookseller. She tried many other jobs but keeps coming back to bookselling. At this point she is also pretty sure her book obsessed family would rebel if she stopped working in the book industry. When she isn’t working at Papercuts JP or day-dreaming about her future bookstore, Clarissa has her hands busy with many different crafty hobbies, most of which are paper based (a strong theme in her life it seems).
Find her online: Twitter | Instagram
Hope is Anushree "Anu" Nande's superpower. Arsenal Football Club, perhaps irrationally, dominates many of this Mumbai girl's waking (and sleeping) hours; the rest she spends studying (she's currently doing an MA in Publishing and Writing at Emerson), freelancing, reading, writing, hoarding books, working through creative demons with sport and art, and asking herself what Coach Taylor would do. In October 2015, Underground Voices published her microfiction collection, 55 Words. Anu's also got an MA and BA in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University in Lancashire, England, and has lived in Spain for a nine-month stint as an English conversational assistant.
Find her online: Twitter | Instagram | Website
Meaghan O’Brien is a writer, editor, and music junkie with hair that can’t settle on what color it wants to be. By day, she edits ESL textbooks for National Geographic Learning; by night, she writes and edits for the BMA-nominated Sound of Boston music blog; and in the in-between times, she has her hands and eyes in many books, Edward Novelhands style. She will finish one of the two fantasy novels she is writing at some point in the near future. She has a BFA in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College. She lives in Brighton where she is well on her way to curating a personal library.
Find her online: Twitter | Instagram
Yara Reca-Vargas was raised between Boston and NYC. She graduated from Harvard University with her bachelor's in Liberal Arts, and she's worked at Boston Children's Hospital for the past twelve years. However, her alter ego is an avid reader and book reviewer. Besides reading, she enjoys spending time with her family and friends, volunteering with various groups, exploring the world, and taking cat naps with her thirty pound Maine Coon, Slick. Her slogan is "reading is traveling with your mind," and "the best form of education is travel."
Find her online: Twitter
Emilie Rodgers is an artist, author, seamstress, and night-owl living in the Greater Boston area. She has a B.S. in Game Art & Animation from Champlain College. She began her career as a freelance video game artist and is now employed as a graphic designer working with major brands in online advertising. In her free time she writes, draws, sews, and plans for her next world-travel adventure. Her dream is to publish a novel.
Find her online: Instagram | Website
ADVISORY BOARD
Rhoda Belleza ADVISOR |
Patrice Caldwell ADVISOR |
Rebecca Podos ADVISOR |
Rachel Strolle ADVISOR |
Joanna Volpe ADVISOR |
Rhoda Belleza was raised in Los Angeles, where she grew up writing X-Files fanfiction and reading LeGuin. She's an editor for Lonely Planet Kids and the author of Empress of a Thousand Skies and its sequel Blood of a Thousand Stars.
Find her online: Twitter | Instagram | Website
Photo Credit: Kyle Graffam
Patrice Caldwell is a writer, Associate Editor at Disney-Hyperion, and the founder & fundraising chair of People of Color in Publishing. She's also a contributor to Publishing Crawl, Bustle, and Autostraddle as well as a tea-enthusiast. Her writing is represented by Peter Knapp at Park Literary & Media.
Find her online: Twitter | Instagram | Website
Rebecca Podos is the author of YA novels The Mystery of Hollow Places and Like Water, with her third novel, The Psychic Sisters of Saltville, coming January 2019. She is a graduate of the Writing, Literature and Publishing MFA Program at Emerson College. By day, she represents Young Adult and Middle Grade fiction at the Rees Literary Agency in Boston.
Find her online: Twitter | Website
Rachel Strolle is the newly minted teen librarian at Glenside Public Library District, located in a western suburb of Chicago. She coordinated the 2018 Tournament of Books for the Young Adult Services Forum, a division of the Illinois Library Association. She was a bookseller for over five years at Andersons Bookshop, where she helped plan and run summer camps based off books and was awarded a 2017 Holiday Bookseller Bonus from James Patterson. Rachel shouts about books on her blog, Rec-It Rachel and on Twitter. Most importantly, she has a dog named Winston who is both the cutest and naughtiest Welsh Terrier in the universe.
Find her online: Twitter | Website
Joanna Volpe is a literary agent and the president of New Leaf Literary & Media, where she represents a broad reach of fiction and non-fiction. Joanna works with incredible talent such as Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows, Henry Holt), Ryan Higa (How to Write Good, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), Veronica Roth (Divergent series, Katherine Tegen Books), Sasha Alsberg (Zenith, Inkyard Press), and Holly Black (Cruel Prince, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), among others. In her fiction, she is seeking unique and diverse perspectives, and enjoys morbid, strange, and offbeat topics. Her tastes in non-fiction range from food-related books and travel books to general pop-culture and pop-science, on to narrative non-fiction featuring captivating and powerful women.
Find her online: Twitter | Website