Our Team
Helene Atwan
Principle
Helene Atwan began her publishing career in 1976 at Random House before moving to Alfred A. Knopf in 1977; she then joined The Viking Press in 1979, and in 1981, she moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she began as the director of publicity, becoming a vice president of the house in 1987, and the associate publisher in 1991. In 1993, she joined the Pocket Books division of Simon & Schuster as a vice president and director of marketing. She was appointed director of Beacon Press 1995, where acquired and edited numerous award-winning books, including by Mary Oliver, Gayl Jones, Anita Hill, Rashid Khalidi, Cornel West, Sonia Sanchez, Lani Guinier, Bill Ayers, Howard Zinn, Danielle Ofri, Richard Blanco, among others. She served on PEN New England’s Executive Board, including as Chair, and also served on various advisory boards, including those of Hopkins University Press, the MiT Press, the Bellevue Literary Review, and the NAACP Entertainment Board. Currently, she lives in Pasadena, California, where she works as a contributing editor at Beacon Press.
Bill Marx
Principle
Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He has contributed book reviews to a variety of national publications, from The Nation and the Village Voice Literary Supplement to the Columbia Journalism Review, Parnassus, and Boston Globe. He is a past member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle and was a finalist (three times) for the organization’s Reviewer’s Citation. In 2000 he created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England. Since 2015 he has taught a seminar on writing arts criticism at Boston University.
David O’Connor
Principle
David O’Connor is an experienced management executive with 35 years in educational technology and digital learning. He is retired, now consulting to start-up companies addressing challenges in US K-12 education. He is also a director of a 2000-person volunteer organization focused on voter protection across the U.S. He has served in strategic leadership roles in leading education for-profit and non-for-profit organizations such as Pearson, LearnLaunch, Wireless Generation, and Amplify Education, and with leading technology companies such as Apple Computer and Lotus Development He is currently serving on the Board of Directors of Curious Learning, a global literacy company focused on bringing pre-literacy and early literacy skills to children in Africa. He has a BA with highest honors from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.
Crystal L. Paul
Advisor
Crystal L. Paul is a journalist and editor based in Chicago. Previously, she worked as an assistant editor at a non-profit publishing house in Boston, covered books and literary culture for online publications, and worked the arts and culture and communities beats at the Seattle Times, where she also served as Interim Features Editor and earned awards for her coverage of the Native community’s canoe journey tradition, the history of tipped workers in the Northwest, and the region’s little known Buffalo Soldiers history. As a reporter and editor, she launched initiatives for accountability and diversity in media coverage and newsrooms and co-created the “communities” beat at the Seattle Times to center topics crucial to undercovered communities. Currently based in Chicago, she is the State Investigations Editor with Illinois Answers Project.
Leigh Haber
Advisor
Leigh Haber is a book publishing veteran who has worked as a publicity director and editor and briefly had her own imprint. Over the course of decades, she has worked with such authors as Al Gore, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Steve Martin, Laurie Garrett, Rosalyn Carter, Martha Beck, Terry Gross, Bill Maher, Umberto Eco, Charles Simic, and many others. For ten years she ran Oprah’s Book Club and curated all books coverage for O, the Oprah Magazine and Oprah Daily. Currently, she is a consultant for such organizations as Equality Now, PEN, Tertulia, and Sourcebooks. She writes frequent book reviews for publications such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, and is an independent book editor. Leigh lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, and spends as much time as humanly possible with her three-year-old grandson.
Rob McQuilkin
Advisor
Rob McQuilkin, a graduate of Phillips Academy and Columbia University, started out in publishing at Warner Books (now known as Grand Central Publishing) and then moved on to Anchor Books/Doubleday, as Editor. Rob later cut his teeth as an agent while working with Ike Williams and Jill Kneerim at The Palmer & Dodge Agency , before leaving to start what is now Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. Representing clients who have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and le Prix Medicis, among other major awards and prizes, Rob specializes in fiction, memoir, history, cultural criticism, and poetry.
David L. Ulin
Advisor
David L. Ulin is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times and a Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he co-directs the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and edits the journal Air/Light. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, as well as a COLA Individual Master Artist Grant from the City of Los Angeles, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and The Best American Essays 2020. David is the author, most recently, of the novel Thirteen Question Method. His other books include Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. For Library of America, he has edited three volumes of the works of Joan Didion.
Sanj Kharbanda
Advisor
Sanj Kharbanda is Associate Publisher, Director of Sales and Marketing at Beacon Press. He joined Beacon in 2017 after holding executive positions in marketing and digital strategy at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sanj thrives at the intersection of books, marketing, and technology: he is an engineer by training, but books and bookselling are his passion.
Michael Taeckens
Advisor
Michael Taeckens is the co-founder of Broadside PR and a literary agent at Massie & McQuilkin. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s worked in publishing since 1995. His publicity clients have been awarded and shortlisted for major international literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Booker Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN America Literary Award, Whiting Award, Windham-Campbell Prize, and Story Prize, among others, and have been featured regularly in national media, including eight of his projects on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.
Pamela MacColl
Advisor
Pamela MacColl has been the Communications Director at Beacon Press since 1999. Before joining Beacon, she held positions at Random House, New American Library, The Scribner Book Company, and MacMillan. She served as a publicity consultant to St. Martin’s Press, Random House, and Simon and Schuster. While at Beacon, Pamela has worked with a wide range of authors, including Marian Wright Edelman, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Rashid Khalidi, Robert Reich, William Ayers, Anita Hill, Danielle Ofri, Eboo Patel, Reverend Dr. William J. Barber, II, Cornel West, Lani Guinier, Marcus Rediker, Sheryll Cashin, and Jeanne Theoharis. Pamela and her husband raised their three children in Providence, RI, where they still live.
Bev Rivero
Advisor
Bev Rivero is Senior Publicist at Beacon Press: Before joining Beacon in 2021, Bev was the communications and marketing manager at the National Book Foundation, where she worked on the National Book Awards, promoted the Foundation’s public and educational programs, and led all social media and marketing campaigns. Prior to NBF, she was in publicity at the New Press for 6 years, where she worked with authors committed to social justice, including Paul Butler, Michelle Alexander, and many more. She has extensive experience promoting nonfiction and tailoring outreach campaigns that resonate with activists and change-makers. Bev is a NYC-based graduate of Johns Hopkins University, ardent supporter of indie presses, and a graphic designer.
Regina Brooks
Advisor
Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency in New York, New York. Her agency is the largest African American owned agency in the country and has established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Her authors have appeared in USA Today, the New York Times, and the Washington Post as well as on Oprah, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSBNC, TV One, BET, and a host of others. In 2015, Publishers Weekly nominated Regina Brooks as a PW Star Watch Finalist, and she was honored with a Stevie Award in Business. Writer’s Digest Magazine named Serendipity Literary Agency as one of the top 25 literary agencies. She is currently the President of the Association of American Literary Agents (AALA) and co-chair of its Communications Committee, co-producer of the U.S. Book Show, a founding member and board member of Literary Agents of Change (LAOC), and a board member of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). Formerly, she held senior editorial positions at John Wiley and Sons (where she was not only the youngest but also the first African American editor in their college division) and McGraw-Hill.