Emily Louise Smith is an associate professor of publishing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she also directs the Publishing Laboratory. In 2009, she co-founded Lookout as a haven for emerging and historically underrepresented voices, and has spent the past fifteen years building platforms for authors. She currently leads the imprint’s acquisitions and advancement strategies, sales and marketing, publicity, and book design. Under her leadership, Lookout titles have won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Fiction Prize, and have been named finalists for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Young Lions Fiction Award.

Smith’s courses, including the practicum that powers Lookout Books, demystify publishing processes and afford students opportunities to engage in decision-making as they examine and reimagine the field. Her research areas range from the history and practice of independent publishing to explorations of family.

Smith earned a BA in English with a concentration in gender studies from Davidson College and an MFA in Poetry from UNCW. She has been named a YWCA Woman of Achievement in the Arts, a recipient of UNCW’s Innovation in Teaching Award, and a finalist for Wilma magazine’s Women to Watch Awards. She was awarded a 2023 Artist Support Grant from the Arts Council of Wilmington and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize.

KaToya Ellis Fleming is an assistant professor of publishing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In her role at Lookout, she acquires and lead edits the literary works of emerging and historically underrepresented authors. Her first acquisition for the imprint, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, edited by the late Valerie Boyd, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for specialty book and took home silver in anthology from the Foreword INDIES. 

As a teacher, Fleming brings her editorial philosophy to her courses, providing students with a foundation for practicing social and cultural literacy and responsibility in the field of publishing.

Fleming currently serves on the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame Board of Judges. She was a 2023 Sewanee Writers’ Scholar and the recipient of a 2021 American Copy Editors Society Richard S. Holden Diversity Fellowship. Prior to her role at Lookout, she was awarded the 2019–2020 Oxford American Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship.

She holds a BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in Narrative Nonfiction from the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on race and culture in the American South.

Gerald Maa began as editor and director of the Georgia Review in 2019. Since then, the literary journal has won, among other things, multiple National Magazine Awards as well as the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. In 2010, he cofounded the not-for-profit literary arts organization Asian American Literary Review with Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, where he served as editor in chief until he joined the Georgia Review.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times best–selling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the John Leonard Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including the Washington Post, the New York Times, TIME, NPR, the Atlantic, Vogue, and more. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

Cassie Mannes Murray has worked across publishing as a writer, designer, and literary agent. Currently, she is the founder and director of Pine State Publicity, a board member for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, an advisor for Swing magazine, and a mom to two beautiful boys. 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling collection of nature essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments and four previous poetry collections, including Oceanic. She is a professor of English in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Her book of food essays is called Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees. 

Deesha Philyaw’s debut story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. 

Sumanth Prabhaker is the former editor in chief of Orion magazine and its current editor at large. The founding editor of Madras Press, he now serves as editorial director of Amherst College. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he was an editor for Ecotone magazine.