Restless Books Team
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, Aperture, and Open City Books. She was a friend and editor to Hunter S. Thompson, spanning two books and the last four years of his life. Her essays have appeared 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, ASSISTANT EDITOR
Paulina Ochoa-Figueroa is originally from Michoacán, México. She is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in the Spanish and Portuguese Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, which 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 key 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 Interpreting Studies and teaches Spanish language and literature.
RODRIGO AGUILERA CROASDAILE, ASSISTANT EDITOR
Rodrigo Aguilera Croasdaile was born and raised in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He graduated from Amherst College in 2023 with a double major in English and Computer Science. For his Senior Honors thesis, he wrote Capital, a political thriller set in Tegucigalpa. He has appeared in the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism with an essay on Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. He writes in both English and Spanish.
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. As a co-founder of Nativ Policy and Planning Consultants, she contributed to projects including the West Bank Data Project, the Israel Experience Project and the Commission for Jewish Education in North America. 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.
Cynthia Hall Kouré, Advisor to the Publisher
Cynthia Hall Kouré offers her fundraising and strategic planning expertise to Restless Books as Advisor to the Publisher. She works as a development consultant, raising money for nonprofits involved in education, historic preservation, human services, and the humanities. She transitioned into fundraising after working as an editor developing college textbooks for teaching German, French, Spanish, and English as a Second Language. Her publishing clients included Houghton Mifflin; John Wiley & Sons; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; McGraw Hill; and Prentice Hall. Her current interests include Nordic cultures and North Germanic languages, including Icelandic, Faroese, Norn, and Norwegian. She holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
editorial Interns
ABBY EDGECUMBE
Abby Edgecumbe is currently earning her Master’s in Literature at the University of Amherst. She’s a creative writer with a few published stories to her name. She writes literature content for Time’s Arrow Inc., and is a book reviewer for BookBrowse. She believes reading is essential to having an active and empathetic role in this world. She hopes to bring beautiful literature to as many people as possible and champion underrepresented stories during her time as a Restless intern.
PAULINE LANTERMANN
Pauline Lantermann is a graduate student of English Literature and an intern for Restless Books. Originally from a small village between Frankfurt and Cologne, she has since lived in Scotland, Latvia, the US and various cities in Germany. In Heidelberg, Germany, she co-founded the student literary publication Litter and functions both as editor and layouter.
RASHMITHA MUNIANDI
Rashmitha Muniandi is a writer and editor from Bangalore, India. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she is the recipient of the 2023-24 MFA and REAL Fellowships. She writes fiction on race, postcolonial India and deities. She aspires to be a divergent voice in the publishing world.
camille nagy
Camille Nagy is an undergraduate student pursuing English and creative writing at the University of Michigan. There, she writes book reviews for the Michigan Daily and is the prose editor of the RC Review literary magazine. She is passionate about language and storytelling in all its forms, and she hopes to someday live abroad.
aurora sharp
Aurora Sharp is an undergraduate student studying Writing and Visual Art at Sarah Lawrence College. In her future career, she hopes to explore investigative podcasting, illustration, library science, and middle grade fiction. She grew up in the rural countryside of Vermont.
ANNA SHUMWAY
Anna Shumway is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania studying Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics. In her free time she loves to read anything from contemporary fiction to fantasy, write short and long-form fiction, and paint pictures of Alaska, where she grew up. She hopes to work with stories of all kinds and one day publish her own.
PAULINE BISSELL
Jeffrey Zhou
Founding Staff
Ilan Stavans, CO-founder
JOSHUA ELLISON, co-founder
ANNETTE HOCHSTEIN, EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Michael Berk, Digital Director
Brinda ayer, Managing Editor
Jackson saul, assistant editor
Equal Employment Opportunity StATEMENT
Restless Books is an equal opportunity employer. In accordance with anti-discrimination law, Restless Books does not discriminate on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, sex or gender (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender expression, and gender identity), age, disability, genetic information, military service, or any other characteristic or class protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.