Local Author Extravaganza

Join the APS Press for our second annual local author event! Each author will have 5 short minutes to discuss their work.

Registration is required.

On Wednesday, June 17th at 5:30 PM the APS Press will be hosting our second annual local author extravaganza! Join us for an evening of refreshments, connections, and hearing from 10 captivating authors, researchers, and scholars from across the Philadelphia area. Books will be sold on site by Head House Books. This event is free to attend and open to the public, with registration required on our events page.

Our authors this year are: ‘Pemi Aguda, W.M. Akers, Radha Lin Chaddah, Amy Jane Cohen, Jeannine A. Cook, Natalie M. Léger, Robert McCracken Peck, Jon McGoran, Nancy Reddy, and Eshani Surya. Find out more about these exciting writers below!

‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the author of One Leg on Earth and Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards in Fiction, the LA Times First Fiction Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and her short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine.

W.M. Akers is a bestselling novelist, playwright, and game designer. He is the author of the mystery novels To Kill a Cook, Critical Hit, Pocket Full of Stars, Westside, Westside Saints, and Westside Lights; the creator of the tabletop games Deadball: Baseball With Dice and Comrades: A Revolutionary RPG, and the editor of the newsletter Strange Times. He lives in Philadelphia but hasn’t traded in his Mets cap yet. Learn about his work at wmakers.net and akersgames.com.

Radha Lin Chaddah is the author of And the Ancestors Sing (Rising Action/Simon and Schuster). She was born in London to an East Indian father and a Malaysian Chinese mother, and earned medical and law degrees at the University of Illinois and a Master of Public Health at Harvard University. Radha and her husband and children moved, over the course of twenty years, from Boston to NYC to Taipei to Shanghai to Beijing to Princeton, and finally to Philadelphia. Radha, who served as a primary care physician, also co-wrote the book, HIV/ AIDS: Beyond the Numbers, with the China CDC. Visit her online at radhalinchaddah.com.

Amy Jane Cohen spent twenty years as a middle and high school social studies teacher. In 2013, she became the Director of Education at the film company History Making Productions, where she developed educational materials to accompany documentaries, mostly about the history of Philadelphia. Amy produced Octavius V. Catto: A Legacy for the 21st Century which won a Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award for Historic/Cultural Program Feature. Amy is a frequent contributor to Hidden City, an online magazine about Philadelphia’s history and built environment. Her first book Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape: Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy was published by Temple University Press in 2024.

Jeannine A. Cook is a writer, cultural curator, multidisciplinary artist, and founder of the avant-garde bookshop concepts Harriett’s Bookshop in Philadelphia, Ida’s Bookshop in South Jersey, and Josephine’s, a literary installation in Paris. She is the author of the novel It’s Me They Follow (Amistad/HarperCollins) and the memoir, Shut Up & Read: A Memoir from Harriett’s Bookshop. Cook’s books and writing have been featured or reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Shelf Awareness, Booklist, The Bookseller, Book Riot, Essence, BET, Ms. Magazine, Women’s World, Cleaver Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Informer, and other literary and cultural outlets.

Natalie M. Léger is a Caribbean studies, Haitian studies, and Black studies scholar who brings history, philosophy, and politics in conversation with fiction and film. Her interdisciplinary scholarship specializes in race and anti-colonial thought, decolonial philosophy, and resistant politics in twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean literature and African diasporic literature. These interests are also treated alongside her efforts to interrogate the place of magic and the fantastic in politics and philosophy, which she pursues when studying and teaching about magical realism and love as a politic. Together, her areas of study and research foci, inform the questions that animate her work. These questions include, what makes us human in a world categorized by difference? What shapes how we love and who we love in politically fraught moments? Or how might magic or the fantastic serve as a political lens to reimagine our relations the world over? Léger was awarded multiple yearlong fellowships in support of her work, including the Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now Institute for Citizens and Scholars) and a faculty fellowship at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She also completed an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tufts University in 2014 and was a 2016-2017 Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship Recipient. She received her PhD in English Literature from Cornell University in 201l, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Temple University.

Historian, naturalist, writer, and world traveler, Robert McCracken Peck holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master of arts degree from the Winterthur Program in American Cultural History, University of Delaware. Widely published, Peck is the author of Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of North America, the companion volume to the eight-part BBC/PBS television series of the same title. It was named one of the most notable natural history/science books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. As Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, he served as chronicler, historian, and photographer of many scientific research expeditions around the world. In 1988 a new species of South American frog, one of three he discovered in the upper Amazon basin in Ecuador, was named in his honor.

Jon McGoran is the author of eleven novels for adults and young adults, including his latest science fiction thriller, The Price of Everything, from Solaris Books, which was longlisted for the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize. His other books include the YA science fiction thrillers Spliced, Splintered, and Spiked, and the science thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up. McGoran is a developmental editor and ghostwriter, and a teacher in Drexel University’s Creative Writing MFA program. He lives outside Philadelphia with his wife Elizabeth, a librarian. For more, visit www.jonmcgoran.com or @JonMcGoran on social media.

Nancy Reddy is an award-winning poet and essayist whose writing unpacks the bad ideas that steal our joy. Her most recent book is The Good Mother Myth, which the Washington Post called “a tender and moving case study of the effects that bad theories have when they breach the bounds of the clinic.” It was chosen as a Next Big Idea Club’s January 2025 Must-Read and featured on an episode of Tamron Hall. Her previous books include the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which she co-edited with Emily Pérez. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Stockton University, where she is also Faculty Co-Director of Murphy Writing.

Eshani Surya is the author of RAVISHING (Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic), which received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and is a Chicago Review of Books and Debutiful Best Debut of 2025. A disabled, South Asian writer, Eshani is a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, a Mae Fellowship recipient, and a Semi-Finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Award for Novel In-Progress. Her writing has been supported by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Asian Women Writer’s Workshop and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, the anthology, Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Eshani serves as a board member and instructor at the literary non-profit Blue Stoop in Philadelphia. Find her online @eshanisurya or http://eshani-surya.com.

Publishing salons are hosted every other month by the APS Press on a variety of topics related to publishing, with the goal of bringing together Philly's vibrant writing/publishing/reading community. All are welcome!