Michael Mejias has been at Writers House for over two decades and is the founder and director of both the Writers House Intern Program (WHIP) and the Writers House Mentor Initiative (WHMI). Through these programs, he’s facilitated the placement of over 750 young people in their first publishing jobs, with a third of those placements being from BIPoC spaces. Additionally, Mr. Mejias is the founding executive director of Inkluded and the principal designer of Inkluded Academy, a free publishing course for BIPoC publishing aspirants. Mr. Mejias is also the co-founder and executive director of the Dramatic Question Theatre (DQT), a company dedicated to developing and presenting plays written by BIPoC and Female-identifying playwrights. He’s from the West Farms housing projects in the South Bronx.

Julia Kardon was born and raised in New York City. Her first job in publishing, while in high school, was shelving fiction at the fabled Strand Bookstore. After receiving degrees in Comparative Literature, as well as in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago, she moved to Prague to teach English for a year. Julia then returned to New York to restart her career in publishing. She joined HSG in 2018 after building a list at Mary Evans Inc and handling foreign rights. Her clients include New York Times Best Seller Brit Bennett, Barnes & Noble Discover picks John Freeman Gill, Leah Franqui, and Etaf Rum, Center For Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow Melissa Rivero, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and others.

Mackenzie has been an agent with the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency since 2016. Prior to that, she was an agent with New Leaf Literary + Media and Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. Her clients have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List, and have been winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award, LA Times Book Prize, ALA Carnegie Medal, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award, and the Black Caucus of the ALA Award and finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the the Lambda Literary Award. She represents investigative journalism, history, hybrid memoir, poetry, upmarket adult fiction and graphic books. She particularly appreciates work that explores today’s most pressing issues through a compelling story and can be used as tools for social change.

Cecilia Gray is a Production Editor at Simon & Schuster. For the past decade, she has been passionate about and active in her work to amplify diverse voices in publishing, both as it pertains to authors and professionals in the industry. Through her three years of full-time work at Simon & Schuster, her freelance proofreading career, and her internships with Writers House, Simon & Schuster, Folio, Foundry, and The Strand Magazine, she has helped publish over 100 stories that achieve this mission. And her career is only beginning! When she’s not working, she’s probably planning her next trip, going for a swim, or unabashedly rewatching her favorite sitcoms and rom-coms.

Karen van de Vrande is helping Girls Write Now raise funds to grow and expand their successful programs. After a long career in corporate management with AT&T, RSL Communications, and Nielsen, Karen was living the life of leisure when the siren song of nonprofit fundraising led her to begin grant writing for a theater group in New York City and then for several other nonprofits across the United States. Having had her own foundation for many years, one priority of which was funding young people and the arts, and being on several nonprofit boards herself, she knows how challenging it is to raise money and wants to do what she can to help.

Nazli Islam is from Gainesville, Florida, but currently lives in New York City. She attended Inkluded Academy as a matriculant in 2021. She works as Production Associate in reprints at Penguin Random House.

An Inkluded Academy matriculant from 2024, Yuna Shprecher is originally from Phoenix, Arizona. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in English and American Studies and is currently a publicity and marketing intern at Grove Atlantic. Her favorite sort of books are short story collections and memoirs. Beyond books, she enjoys going to the movies using her AMC Stubs A-list membership, telling everyone she knows to get the AMC membership, and eating everything bagels in the park. Yuna is the Social Media Director for Inkluded.

An Atlanta native, Alexandra took a circuitous route to publishing. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in neuroscience, and then, realizing her passion lay closer to books, she pursued a Master’s degree in Publishing, Print and Digital Media from New York University. Currently, she is a Senior Editor at Little Brown Books for Young Readers (Hachette Book Group) and is actively acquiring picture books, middle grade, and young adult titles. Recent highlights from her list include the Newbery Award winner Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson, We Are Not Broken by George M. Johnson, and the CSK Award winning picture book The Me I Choose to Be by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley and Kahran and Regis Bethencourt. Previous to joining Hachette, she worked in editorial at Delacorte Press (Penguin Random House) and was a Summer 2016 intern at Writers House.