Melanie spent a disproportionate segment of her young life reading novels in her bedroom closet and writing bad poems in knock-off Lisa Frank notebooks. Now she mostly reads psychology journals, student papers, and do-gooder social-justice-oriented nonfiction, but she still tries to keep up with her favorite authors.

Nick majored in literature and philosophy in college, focusing on post-war American novels. He taught composition and literature for few years before becoming a game designer. Now, he teaches interactive narrative at the graduate level, so he keeps up with lots of weird kinds of storytelling, and he spends his reading time between literature he's catching up on and non-fiction work in media studies, social justice, economics, and technology.

Dan is a creative entrepreneur and software engineer who usually focuses on games, play, and the processes and technologies that support programming and design. He is interested in the mechanisms that attract and direct user attention, and how different varieties of media stimulate us to wonder, plan, empathize, and become invested in our own stories that we create around them. When between novels, he is often reading non-fiction about physics, the brain, and other scientific topics.

David spent half of his freshman year at Swarthmore taking English courses before getting distracted by political science and history. He was a thriller genre fan growing up and has written a business book and two thrillers. He teaches graduate students at NYU and loves thinking about the use of narrative outside of literary contexts.

Demetri spent the years between 1980 and 1992 getting yelled at for reading at the dinner table and now gleefully sticks it to the man by reading there every night. His typical reading pattern alternates between non-fiction (usually history, linguistics, religion or some hyphenate of those), "literary fiction", and escapist fiction (sci-fi, comic books, hard-boiled detective novels, and historical fiction are favorites). Inexplicably, Demetri has never really gotten into novels with elves in 'em, despite his lifelong Dungeons & Dragons habit.

Jill grew up in a small town in Tennessee and spent her high school years pretending that she understood the musty Dostoevsky and Tolstoy novels she bought from a nearby thrift store. After a long stint of working to help people understand economics, now she is working to get people fired up about science. She still isn't sure she gets Dostoevsky.

When she is not reading board books centering on the adventures of a speaking animal protagonist, Kim is a voracious consumer of non-fiction focused on natural history, art, and human rights.

Mirjam is an Emmy award-winning producer at MSNBC. Currently working for "The Beat with Ari Melber," she holds a Masters in Communication Studies with a focus in media analysis. Mirjam taught post-production at Montclair State University and has produced two award-winning documentaries. She is an avid runner and has completed a dozen marathons, as well as an Ironman triathlon.

Riddhi is a counseling psychologist and currently a faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is passionate about multiculturalism, intersectionality, and the general social justice warrior-esque topics. Riddhi also likes pop culture, discovering cheap culinary treasures, and independent cinema.

Sarah is a K-12 librarian and theatre director at an all-boys' school, where she spends her days reading aloud to younger students, teaching media literacy to middle schoolers, and hounding older students for better citations. She is a few credits away from completing a Masters in English at the dreamy Bread Loaf school, where she has been able to indulge her love of Shakespeare and the Russians. When she's not reading kid lit or texts for classes, Sarah loves contemporary fiction and biographies, especially of baseball players or Laura Ingalls Wilder.