Our 2024 Judges

Luis Alberto Correa is general manager at White Whale Bookstore in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Previously he was operations manager at Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia. He has served as a member of the American Bookseller Association (ABA) committee on diversity, equity and inclusion, chair for ABA's Indies Introduce, and juror for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction.

James Crossley has been an independent bookseller and staunch advocate for small presses and international literature for more than twenty years, including a stint as judge for the Best Translated Book Award. Until the end of 2023 he was the founding manager of Madison Books in Seattle, named by Publishers Weekly as one of the five best bookstores in the United States. He is now the proprietor of Leviathan Bookstore in St. Louis, which opened in 2024.

Rebekah Rine is the Buyer & Inventory Manager at Watermark Books & Café in Wichita, Kansas, after having worked in many roles throughout the store for over twenty years. Passionate about books and the people who read them, she loves nothing more than connecting readers with new and favorite writers. Rebekah has been involved in education throughout the industry and has been a recipient of the Booksellers Without Borders fellowship.

Dorian Stuber is a writer and Professor of English at Hendrix College. His work has appeared in The Oxford American, On the Seawall, and Firmament, among other places. He blogs about his reading at  Eiger, Monch & Jungfrau and co-hosts the One Bright Book podcast. He lives in Little Rock.

Chris Via’s work appears in Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Splice, The Arts Fuse, and The Rupture. He contributed the afterword to Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer in 2021, and in 2018 won honorable mention for Grove Atlantic’s national book review competition of theMystery.doc, featured on Lit Hub. Chris also hosts the growing, literature-obsessed YouTube channel Leaf by Leaf. He holds a BA in computer science and an MA in humanities.

Lori Feathers is a writer and podcaster in Dallas, Texas, and a co-owner/founder of Interabang Books where she is the store’s book buyer. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed books podcast, “Across the Pond,” is founding Chair of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, US and Canada, a prize honoring the work of small publishers, and co-creator of the Inside Literary Prize for incarcerated persons. For six years she served on the elected board of the National Book Critics Circle.