our authors
Alphabetical (S-Z)
DR. LAURA SCHERLING, EdD
Laura Scherling is a professor and lecturer at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Tech Policy and Innovation (TPI) Concentration. Here, she works specifically with Tech Policy and Innovation, where her director is the author and journalist Anya Schriffin and with colleagues such as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa. At Columbia, Laura teaches “Ethics in Technology” and “Understanding Emerging Technologies” courses which cover AI, cybersecurity, quantum, defense, and space. Recently, she has won the “Top Five” instructor award across the entire school. Her articles have appeared in the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, Design Observer, The Urban Activist, Design and Culture, Spark Journal, and Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture. Additionally, she has contributed chapters and articles in the edited collection Futures Worth Preserving Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability (Transcript Verlag) and the Encyclopedia of Design (Bloomsbury).
MY ROBOT FRIENDS (Technology) - is a journey into the often-surprising world of AI through the eyes of nine pioneering inventors. From chatbots that comfort the lonely to carebots that aid the elderly, Dr. Scherling reveals how AI is reshaping companionship, caregiving, and even human identity.
THE FUTURE OF HACKING IS DIFFERENT THAN YOU THINK (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) - Dr. Scherling explores the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, ethical hacking, and digital defense, revealing how hacking has transformed from an underground practice to a mainstream issue that affects governments, businesses, and individuals alike. Drawing on years of research and over 30 in-depth interviews with cybersecurity professionals from around the world, including experts from San Francisco, Seoul, Cape Town, Paris, and Bengaluru, this book offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the people working to protect our digital future. From ethical hackers uncovering security vulnerabilities to policymakers shaping the rules of the digital world, The Future of Hacking sheds light on the critical role of cybersecurity in today's interconnected society.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
AIRY SINDIK
Airy Sindik has a bachelor's degree in sociology from UNAM and a master's in creative writing from the National University of Colombia. His thesis novel Without Air for the Return (Sin Aire para el Regreso) was published by the Guadalajara University Press. He was recently chosen as a fellow at the Istanbul Fellowship. Airy has been invited to read Without Air for the Return at events and book fairs around the world. He has also given readings at the Embassy of Western Sahara in Mexico City and the Network of Embassies of the Sahrawi Arab.
ABULELA Y EL COVID/GRANDMA AND COVID (Arte Publico Press, 2022) - A young boy’s grandmother lives far away, but they keep in touch every day with cell phones and other devices, exchanging videos and photographs, playing games, talking, and sometimes singing together. One day he does not hear from her, and the next time they talk, his grandmother is wearing a mask that covers her nose and mouth. She said she wasn’t feeling well. On the next call, she wears a mask with a tube attached. His father explained the tube was connected to an oxygen tank to help her breathe. Then she stops calling altogether, and the boy is worried. Will he need to go rescue her? This bilingual picture book for children ages 4-8 explores contemporary society’s reliance on cellular and digital devices in communicating with friends and family. Airy Sindik’s moving story, combined with Tony De Luz’s warm illustrations, also portrays the very serious issue of the Covid virus and its impact on loved ones, all seen through the eyes of an imaginative boy.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
EDDIE SMALL
Eddie Small has been a reporter since graduating from the Columbia University School of Journalism as a salutatorian in 2012. His reporting work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and on WNYC, and he works at Crain's New York. He has been a humorist for more than a decade, regularly contributing to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Onion. Several of his more recent humor pieces focus on being a new parent, such as "Welcome to Our Daughter's First Birthday Party, Which is Totally All About Our Daughter!", which appeared in The New Yorker, and "Things to do in a Hotel Room After Your Child Falls Asleep at 7:30 p.m." which was published in McSweeney's. The tone of the book is quite similar to those pieces.
HOW TO BE A DAD (Humor) - Millennials are killing babies. Or so the headlines go, adding baby raising to the large host of industries that Millennials seem to be killing. Despite this murderous rampage, though, plenty of Millennials still seem to be having kids. Eddie Small is one of them. In his new book, Small tackles what it is like for Millennials to start becoming fathers and raising children. Having had his first child in April 2022, Eddie penned How to be a Dad as a humorous and exaggerated version of what they've gone through as new parents. Formatted in a "how-to" style, each chapter tackles a different aspect of raising a child as a new parent, particularly a new dad.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
PAUL SMITH
Chris Berg and Paul James Smith have a combined half-century of boots-on-the-ground law enforcement that gives an unparalleled raw intensity to their narratives. Their careers, spanning undercover operations, SWAT, and high-level state and federal task forces, provide a deep well of firsthand knowledge, and their meticulous attention to detail provides readers with a gripping, authentic portrayal of the criminal underworld. The first draft of Blood Brothers won the Best Investigator Claymore Award at Killer Nashville. and was a Page Turner Award finalist.
BLOOD BROTHERS (Crime Fiction) - Detective Vince Driftwood’s world shatters when his Vietnam brother and patrol partner, Sugarcane Flood, is brutally executed. A line is crossed, and Vince’s badge is no longer enough. Suspended and haunted, he becomes a rogue force hunting killers who thought they were untouchable. Armed with just one clue—a brown Camaro—and everything to lose, Vince plunges into a dark underworld where justice comes at a deadly price. Pursued by the relentless Internal Affairs Sergeant Grace Kiddo and battling his own demons, Vince navigates a treacherous landscape where loyalty is currency and revenge is the only language spoken. As the body count rises and the truth unravels, Vince must decide how much he's willing to sacrifice in his quest for justice. Blood Brothers is a pulse-pounding thriller that explores the unbreakable bonds of brotherhood and the consuming nature of vengeance, hurtling towards a conclusion that will leave no one unscathed.
Contact - Dean Krystek
VICTORIA SMITH
Victoria Smith is an accomplished music photographer currently based in Los Angeles, celebrated for her striking ability to capture candidness and personality in portraits as well as the raw energy and emotion of live performances. With a career of collecting photographs of over 600 artists, she has worked with a diverse array, from emerging talents to international stars. Her dynamic compositions and unique perspectives have earned her features in major publications, including Rolling Stone, Q and Billboard.
COLDPLAY: ONE LENS (Coming Fall of 2026 from Dorling Kindersley) Official Coldplay photographer Victoria Smith’s 20-year photographic history of the world-famous band’s live performances including backstage portraits. Forward by man Chris Martin.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
ARIELLA STEINHORN
Ariella Steinhorn is a writer and former entrepreneur. She has built two ghostwriting and media relations companies focused on exposing power imbalances not picked up on by the mainstream media, called Superposition and Lioness. Ariella’s personal writing on relationships, power, love, and free speech have been published in the New York Times, Fortune, the Boston Globe, and Newsweek. Several essays she has ghostwritten breaking open news about workplace culture and power abuse have seen millions of views. "Lioness essays” became notorious among journalists as a significant source of untold information. Her storytelling practices have been profiled in the New York Times, Elle Magazine, and Bloomberg. Ariella has spoken at Harvard Business School about whistleblowing and has given talks to journalism schools about the future of journalism and storytelling. She recently launched an initiative called Nonlinear Love, which invites stories from the public about unconventional love without prescribing rigid advice or judgment.
POWER TRIP (Memoir) - Exposed to the male gaze and proximity to powerful men from a very young age, Ariella has long struggled to determine what relationship she should have with her own appearance and body. From being tackled at a bus stop at 14-years-old by a group of boys who suddenly found her “hot” to the moment she realized that dating an A-list actor to attract funding for a company she was building, Ariella has spent most of her life entrenched in power dynamics trying to figure out what, if any, relationship she should have with her femininity. Looking back on her experiences, Ariella dissects her life of sex, dating, love, and heartbreak with powerful men-from a sport’s team owner to tech CEOs to a musician and an A-list actor, as mentioned before-as avenues into a broader exploration of the kaleidoscope that is female identity.
Weaving a nonlinear narrative of love, Power Trip dives into a different stereotype about women that the world has tried to lock Ariella into in every chapter: the precocious daughter, the teenage sl*t, the mistress, the siren, the trophy wife…. In doing so, it explores both how Ariella has tried to make herself fit into these roles and break free of them to embrace an identity that is more complex and multifaceted than the world acknowledges women to be. As the narrative’s focus is “the woman” as a person, the names of men in question were kept hidden throughout the manuscript.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
TATJANA STOLJAROVA
Tatjana Stoljarova, J.D. is a linguist, experienced certified interpreter and ESL instructor, professional speaker, and a mother raising a multilingual daughter. A passionate ambassador for multilingualism and cultural and linguistic preservation, Stoljarova has devoted much of the last two decades to promoting the importance of linguistic diversity and the preservation of heritage culture. Her TEDx talk raising awareness of the benefits of multilingualism and the crisis of mother tongues disappearing has reached over a million viewers.
AN IDIOM A DAY KEEPS YOUR MOTHER TONGUE IN PLAY (Culture) - A practical and inspirational guide for preserving heritage languages within the family and explores both the personal and communal advantages of multilingualism. Stoljarova’s I.D.I.O.M. Method™ is an innovative approach to preserving and teaching languages through idioms.
Contact - Macey Howell
ALY TADROS
Aly Tadros is the Assistant Director of the Sexual Violence Response at Columbia Medical School, a position that allows her to bridge her expertise in trauma recovery and kink-affirming care. Formerly a touring singer-songwriter, she brings a robust platform, including a 2K+ Substack following, regular podcast appearances, and a strong network within feminist, queer, and kink communities. To date, her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times, Narratively, The Brooklyn Rail, and she's been featured in USAToday and Interview Magazine, among others. Recently, she was featured on The Modern Love Podcast for her essay “Dominate Me, But Not Like That.” She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Queens College, and lives in New York.
ON SUBMISSION (Lifestyle/Memoir) As a biracial, queer woman raised between an Evangelical church and an Egyptian immigrant household, Aly was taught to tether her worth to men and institutions—first the church, then alcohol, and finally, dominant partners. On Submission examines the power dynamics she once sought out in submission and ultimately learned to rewrite. With intimacy and critical inquiry, the book explores the world of kink while speaking to themes of desire, agency, trauma recovery, and feminist re-education. In doing so, it positions kink, a realm that more people are increasingly fascinated by, as both a site of danger and liberation. On Submission will appeal to fans of Maggie Nelson, Melissa Febos, and Adrienne Maree Brown—readers hungry for narratives that do not flinch from the intersections of sexuality, power, and healing. Though interest in BDSM and nontraditional relationships is growing, no major memoir to date has examined female submission from the inside out with the intellectual rigor and lived experience this book brings, given the way it interweaves feminist theory into the narrative.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
JOHN WEST
John West is a writer and technologist, currently reporting the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where his work has won a Loeb, a Philip Meyer, a SABEW, a Barlett and Steele, two New York Press Club awards—and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting and the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. His reportage and essays have also appeared in Comment, Fast Company, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in writing from Bennington College and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory.
FERTILE CIRCUITS (Coming Spring 2027 from Wm. B. Eerdman’s) - Fertile Circuits reveals the rot lurking in the foundation of the internet: everything we put there is fading away. John West, a writer and technologist whose reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize, argues that we should embrace the death of our online ephemera in order to reclaim a more human world. The inexorable drift and destruction of web pages—a phenomenon researchers call link rot—isn’t a scourge to be overcome; rather, it’s an ally in the fight to reclaim a better way to be online. In the garden, we weed and prune, mulch and compost. We let rot and decay create order and beauty. At its core, the internet is no different. If we accept our digital ephemerality and reclaim the power to choose, we will end up with a more fertile web, one that grows stronger communities and a more vibrant, human world.
THE PSALMIST (Fiction) - When Mark returns to his hometown in rural Vermont for his mother’s funeral, he discovers his sister has left behind her newborn. With no one else to take responsibility, he puts his life on hold and takes a leave of absence from his job in Boston. Shouldering grief at his mother’s passing and worry at his sister’s disappearance Mark, a recovering alcoholic, feels the overwhelming stress over his newfound position as a guardian, turning his life into a whirlwind of uncertainty. To try to keep his world in focus; Mark turns to his newfound faith, and every day he finds a random psalm to read hoping its meaning will help him to make sense of the quiet chaos of his life. As a radio producer, it seems only natural to record himself reading these psalms aloud. As days pass and Mark’s savings start dwindling, his faith is tested in more ways than one, though life does seem to drop welcome boons onto his doorstep—a love he might never have pursued and invaluable friends he never would have made otherwise.
Contact - Zeynep Sen