Our Staff

Lindsay Wright

Director of the LARB Publishing Workshop

Lindsay Wright is Director of the LARB Publishing Workshop, where she oversees an intensive summer program for aspiring publishers with 70 fellows and 60 plus industry speakers. She holds an MA from the University of Virginia, where she worked as Director of the Writing Center, designed an online writing curriculum, taught seminars on English and academic writing, and trained incoming teaching assistants for the Center for Teaching Excellence. She taught as a lecturer on English and the American publishing industry for the University of Paris X, Center for the Profession of the Book. As Director of Development for The Music Circle, an Indian music non-profit, Lindsay helped produce 6-8 concerts per year, created new foundation and donor relationships, and maintained partnerships with Occidental College, UCLA, Pasadena City College, and the Ford/LA Philharmonic.

Irene Yoon

Executive Director, LARB

Irene Yoon is the Executive Director of LARB, where she oversees the day-to-day operations and broader strategic vision and planning for the organization. For the last four years, Irene has also served as Director of the LARB Publishing Workshop. She earned her doctorate in English from UC Berkeley, where she also managed an interdisciplinary writing program and trained new teachers as the English Department’s Assistant Pedagogy Chair. Irene has worked with several authors to prepare books and articles for publication, and her own writing has appeared in journals such as Twentieth Century Literature, Transition Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Livia Azevedo Lima

Publishing Workshop Coordinator

Livia Azevedo Lima (she/her) is a book editor, writer, and researcher with a Ph.D. in Modern Cinema and Literature from the University of São Paulo. With more than ten years of experience in publishing, she edits nonfiction books focused on visual culture for Brazilian indie publishing houses while actively participating in the Seattle art and literary scene. Since 2021 she has been part of the curatorial team for Travessias—Brazilian Film Festival at Northwest Film Forum. Livia was a fellow in the 2022 LARB Publishing Workshop.

Michelle Chihara

Editor-in-Chief, LARB

Michelle Chihara is Editor-in-Chief of LARB.  Previously, she was Associate Dean and Director of the Whittier Scholars Program, and Associate Professor of English at Whittier College, where she  taught contemporary American literature, media studies, and creative writing for nine years. Recent peer-reviewed publications include Distinktion: A Journal of Social Theory, American Literary History, Postmodern Culture, and a chapter in New Directions in Print Culture Studies from Bloomsbury Press. She co-edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics (2018). Other essays have appeared in Post45: Contemporaries, Politics/Letters and Avidly.org. Since 2017, she has been the section editor for Econ & Finance at The Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is also a frequent contributor. 
Before getting her doctorate at in English Literature, she received her MFA in Fiction, both at UC Irvine, and before that, she was a reporter, editor and freelancer. She worked as a staff writer at two weekly newspapers, The New Haven Advocate and The Boston Phoenix and as an online editor at the investigative news magazine Mother Jones.  Her reporting and prose have appeared in news outlets like The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle and Mother Jones, as well as magazines like n+1, Nerve.com, Bloomberg.com.  Her essays have been anthologized and her essay from Rare Bird Press’s volume, Slouching Towards Los Angeles was featured on LitHub and on European television; she has published fiction, nonfiction, reportage and essays in a variety of publications, online and off. She once quit her job, sold everything she owned, and moved to Rio de Janeiro to live by the beach and practice capoeira for a year.  

Jonathan Hahn

Magazine Track Faculty

Jonathan Hahn is the faculty leader of the Magazine Track. Jonathan is the Managing Editor of Sierra Magazine. Previously he served as the founding Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has worked in book and magazine publishing for over 20 years.

Daniel Lisi

Book Track Faculty

Daniel Lisi is the faculty of the Publishing Workshop Book Track.  Daniel is a publisher, writer, and entrepreneur. In 2016 he founded Not a Cult, a publisher dedicated to poetry, art, experimental fiction, and social nonfiction. In 2020 Lisi co-founded Chapter House, a publishing group Forbes calls a “new path for competitive small-press publishing in the digital era.”