Publishing Salon: Book Reviewing

On Thursday, August 21st, 2025, the APS Press is hosting our fourth publishing salon of the year. Join us for refreshments, networking, and a panel discussion on book reviewing with six distinguished panelists: Kristen Brida, Paula Marantz Cohen, Ann de Forest, Autumn Konopka, Damon Linker, and Ben Yagoda.

Publishing salons are held every other month on a variety of topics related to the publishing industry.

The event is free to attend, but registration is required. Upon registering for the event, your email address will be added to a mailing list for future news about publishing salons.

Please contact Allison Cadle at [email protected] with questions.

Panelists:

Kristen Brida's poetry has appeared in poetry.onl, Fairy Tale Review, The Journal, New Delta Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at George Mason University. Currently, she is the marketing & programming fellow for The Head & The Hand, a nonprofit, queer-owned bookstore, and works as a Commissioning Editor for Routledge Open Access journals. She also runs a TikTok account dedicated to showing poetry is for everyone @booksby_kb.

Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University where she recently stepped down as dean of Drexel’s Honors College. She is the author of six novels, including a series of satirical novels of manners, of which the best-selling Jane Austen in Boca—Pride and Prejudice set in a Jewish retirement community in Boca Raton—is probably the best known. She is also the author of six nonfiction books. Her most recent non-fiction includes Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us about Empathy and Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation. Talking Cure was published by Princeton University Press where Peter Dougherty, now APS Press Editor-at-large, was her editor. Her book, film, and art reviews, as well as stories and essays, have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Salmagundi, the Journal of Modern Literature, the American Scholar, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Yale Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others.

Ann de Forest writes frequently about design, architecture, and the built environment. Her work in various genres, from poetry to walking art, explores the resonance of places—whether her native California, her adopted hometown of Philadelphia, or farther afield in Italy and India. Her writing has appeared most recently in La Piccioletta Barca, Hippocampus, One Art, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A contributing writer for Hidden City Philadelphia, she is also the editor of the anthology Ways of Walking (New Door Books, 2022).

Autumn Konopka is a writer, editor, mental health advocate, and trauma-informed teaching artist. A former poet laureate of Montgomery County, PA (2016), Autumn’s poetry chapbook a chain of paperdolls was published in 2014, and her award-winning debut novel, Pheidippides Didn’t Die, was released in 2023. Autumn is a Philadelphia native and former President of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference.  As Editor of Reviews and Interviews for Cleaver Magazine, she is particularly interested in books and authors that represent the city’s unique impact on the literary landscape. 

Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in political science at Penn and he writes two posts a week for a Substack subscription newsletter titled Notes from the Middleground. From 2013 through 2019, he acquired books for Penn Press in political theory, intellectual history, and current affairs. He is a former commentary editor for Newsweek and the Daily Beast and a former senior correspondent at The Week. His essays, op-eds, and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other media platforms. He is currently writing a book about Leo Strauss and the American right for Princeton University Press. 

Ben Yagoda is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books, and has written about language, writing, and many other topics for Slate.com, the American Scholar, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and others. His first book review, for his college newspaper, was of the Manhattan Telephone Directory. (He later reviewed the New York City subway map for The New York Times Book Review). He has also reviewed books for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, The New Leader, Philadelphia Magazine, The New Boston Review, The Wilson Quarterly, The Forward, and Change. In 2018, he retired after twenty-five years teaching writing and journalism at the University of Delaware. He currently consults, edits, and works with writers. His book Alias O. Henry, a biographical novel about O. Henry's years in New York, will be published next month with Paul Dry Books. He is also working on a book about irony. No joke.