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Staff

Coffee House Staff

	Lizzie Davis, Editor lizzie@coffeehousepress.org Lizzie is an editor and a translator from Spanish to English. Her recent projects include works by Daniela Tarazona, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Elena Medel, and her co-translation of Medel's Las maravillas with Thomas Bunstead is forthcoming from Pushkin Press. Prior to joining Coffee House Press, she studied literary arts and romance languages at Brown University.
	Daley Farr, Publicist daley@coffeehousepress.org Daley Farr joined Coffee House Press as publicist in 2019, after working with Milkweed Editions as a bookseller, buyer, and events coordinator for their bookstore, Milkweed Books. Previously, she worked in events at Magers and Quinn Booksellers, as well as many actual coffee houses. She graduated from Augsburg College in Minneapolis with a BA in English Literature and Theory, and studied literature at the University of Oxford's Hertford College. She lives near the Mississippi River in South Minneapolis.
	Rob Keefe, Bookkeeper rob@coffeehousepress.org Robert Keefe arrived at the offices of Coffee House Press via a trajectory that reads like a Proustian phrase: long, complex, all-encompassing—beginning as a computer scientist who picked up accounting while networking small construction developers in Los Angeles, to trade that hat and to ply his hands at publishing and writing, and cinema and radio in the Pacific Northwest, then a skip across the pond to Europe as a DJ until an inevitable return to NYC as an accountant for record labels. He packed up shop again for the long mid-west horizons to settle just south of the source of the Mississippi. He’s rather fond of biking and meeting new folks.
	Zoë Koenig, Development Assistant zoe@coffeehousepress.org Zoë joined Coffee House Press in the spring of 2019 following an internship with the press the previous fall. She holds a BA from Beloit College where she focused on literary studies, creative writing, and critical identity studies and served as a production editor for the Beloit Fiction Journal.
	Allan Kornblum, Founder Allan studied poetry at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and published poems in a wide variety of little magazines in the 1970s and early 1980s. During that period he served as the editor, designer, printer, and publisher for Toothpaste Press. From 1984–2011 he served as editor and publisher at Coffee House Press. In recognition of his work at these two presses, Kornblum received an American Book Award for Special Achievement as an Editor and Publisher in 1997. Allan passed away on November 23, 2014.
	Valeria Luiselli, Contributing Editor Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in New York City.
	Enrique Olivarez, Development Director enrique@coffeehousepress.org Enrique Olivarez is Coffee House Press's Development Director. Concurrently, he is also a Senior Associate at 8 Bridges Workshop, a consulting firm specializing in program development and evaluation of public media, philanthropic, and arts and culture organizations. Enrique is from McAllen, TX, has a BA and MA in English from the University of Texas and worked on his PhD at the Ohio State University. He has worked in the development field for 30 years in organizations such as Walker Art Center, MacPhail Center for Music, Minnesota Public Radio, and CLUES (Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio). He specializes in institutional giving, event sponsorships, and corporate giving. Enrique is on the board of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits.
	Sophia Schlesinger, Administrative Assistant sophia@coffeehousepress.org Sophia Schlesinger holds a B.A. in English Literature from Macalester College, where she graduated summa cum laude and with departmental honors in 2020. She is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets College Prize and the author of an honors thesis on a corpus of music called rebetiko. She previously interned with Coffee House Press in the fall of 2019.
	Erika Stevens, Editorial Director erika@coffeehousepress.org Erika Stevens is the editorial director at Coffee House Press, where she has served in various editorial capacities for a decade. Erika currently acquires poetry, nonfiction, and fiction for Coffee House. Erika was previously in acquisitions at the University of Georgia Press and the University Press of Florida; she started her career in publishing at Duke University Press and UNC Press. She has taught in the Graduate Program in Book Publishing at Portland State University and in the Sierra Nevada College MFA program. She dabbles in German to English translation and has freelanced widely for authors, presses, and nonprofit organizations.
	Marit Swanson, Marketing and Sales Manager marit@coffeehousepress.org Marit Swanson joined Coffee House Press in 2019. She previously worked in marketing at Consortium Book Sales & Distribution and as a bookseller and sidelines buyer at Magers & Quinn Booksellers. She studied violin pedagogy at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music. On most Saturday mornings, you'll find her curled up with a cup of tea and a good book, ideally beside one of her two gray cats.
	Carla Valadez, Managing Director carla@coffeehousepress.org Carla Valadez joined Coffee House Press in 2015 with a decade of experience in book publishing. She is a project manager, copy editor, and CHP’s resident Chicago Manual of Style enthusiast. Carla is also on the board of directors of the Minnesota Book Publishers’ Roundtable.
	Quynh Van, Administrative Assistant quynh@coffeehousepress.org Quynh joined Coffee House Press in the summer of 2021 following a spring internship. She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2021 with a BA in Journalism and Studies of Cinema & Media Culture where she was a contributing writer for The Tower. She previously interned with the Loft Literary Center. When she's not reading or writing, she tries to make bread. Emphasis on trying.
	Ken Chen, Spatial Species Editor ken@coffeehousepress.org Ken Chen is the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Award, the oldest annual literary award in America, for his book Juvenilia, which was selected by the poet Louise Glück. He served as the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop from 2008 to May 2019. An NEA, NYFA and Bread Loaf Fellow and National Book Award judge, Chen cofounded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike,a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice. He has been quoted in NPR’s All Things Considered, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. A graduate of Yale Law School, he successfully defended the asylum application of an undocumented Muslim high school student from Guinea detained by Homeland Security. He is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where he is working on Death Star, a book about his traveling to the underworld and seeing there everything that has been destroyed by colonialism. He is represented by the Wylie Agency.
	Youmna Chlala, Spatial Species Editor youmna@coffeehousepress.org Youmna Chlala is a writer and artist born in Beirut and based in New York. Her poetry collection, The Paper Camera, was published by Litmus Press in 2019. She is the recipient of a 2018 O. Henry Prize and a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and is the founding editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in publications such as BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA, MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, and Bahithat: Lebanese Association of Women Researchers. She has exhibited widely including at the Hayward Gallery, the Drawing Center, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Art in General, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Art Dubai, and Hessel Museum of Art. She participated in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, the 2017 LIAF Biennial, and the Performa 11 Biennial. She is a professor in the Humanities and Media Studies and Writing Departments at the Pratt Institute.
	Rachel Lyons, Summer 2021 Intern Rachel is a poet and fiction writer who grew up in Minneapolis and recently graduated from Bard College with a degree in creative writing. Her poems have been published in The Bard Papers and The VEG Literary Magazine. She is enthusiastic about natural history and does a lot of swimming in the lakes around the cities.
	Josie Tolin, Summer 2021 Intern Josie Tolin is a fiction writer from Indiana. An assistant editor at Fiction Writers Review, she'll begin her MFA this fall at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.