our authors
Alphabetical (S-Z)
DR. LAURA SCHERLING, EdD
is a designer, researcher, author, and was the co-founder of GreenspaceNYC, a nonprofit sustainability and design collective. She has been teaching at Columbia University since 2017 and is a director at Columbia University School of Professional Studies. Scherling was the co-editor Ethics in Design and Communication: Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), the editor of Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices (2024) and the author of Product Design, Technology, and Social Change (2024), amongst many other publications in academic and popular journals.Dr. Scherling is a designer, researcher, and writer at Columbia University, where she teaches courses in design and data visualization. She completed her doctorate at Columbia University, Teachers College. Scherling writes about emerging technologies. She is the co-editor of the recently published book Ethics in Design and Communication: New Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury). Her forthcoming books include Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices (Amherst College Press) and A Cultural History of Product Design, Technology, and Social Change (Intellect Books). Her articles have been published by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, Design Observer, The Urban Activist, Design and Culture, Spark Journal, and Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture.
THE FUTURE OF HACKING IS DIFFERENT THAN YOU THINK (Technology) (Bloomsbury Academic, Jul. 2025) - The Future of Hacking Looks Different Than You Think surveys hackers and ethical hacking and explores the experiences of the people working to defend us from cyber-attacks. It explores diverse topics on cybersecurity, Internet freedom, cyber awareness, and technology policies, and considers how we might shape a more digitally secure world. The book focuses on the everyday experiences of hackers, cybersecurity organizations, the victims of those who experience being hacked. The book will help the everyday reader to learn more about malicious hacking and ethical hacking, and what it means to be more cyber-secure. The future of hacking is a story about everybody's everyday safety and wellbeing.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
PETER SCHOOFF
Peter Schooff has been published in The New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and has had several short stories published on the website, East of the Web. His work was included in the humor anthology, More Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor. Also, Peter has been a top tech writer and editor for over fifteen years, appearing as a thought leader in books about data and business process management. Meet him on Twitter: Twitter handle: @pschooff
HELLAWEEN (Paranormal) - The trouble starts the morning after The Fifth Annual Hella Ween Bash when a group of friends discovers they've taken on the persona of their costumed characters from the party. There's Pam, who dressed up as Queen Victoria, a lesbian misfit who waitresses at a diner, and starts acting like she's all that and the Crown Jewels. There's Holly, who went as Aphrodite, her recent dry spell with men becomes a testosterone tsunami—but will that make it any easier for her to find one good guy? There's also a rookie used car salesman who is suddenly able to fly like a superhero, a devil dentist, a voodoo priestess, and Sigmund Freud (who can't stop psychoanalyzing customers in his supermarket checkout line), among others. The gang is divided over whether this is the best thing that's ever happened to them or the worst.
The bewildered gang tries to unravel the mystery of what happened, but there’s just one problem—no one can remember a thing about Halloween night. The only clue they have is a group picture taken moments before the witching hour. However, with a serial killer suddenly terrorizing the town, they worry that it might be one of their fellow partygoers. But what kind of costume would a murderer wear?
Contact - Dean Krystek
SHEILA SHERMET (SAM ANDERS)
Writing under the pen name Sam Anders, Shermet has been a staff interpreter for the UN for over twenty years, working in international affairs and multilateralism in Vienna, Geneva, and New York. Her work has covered a range of topics from international peace to meetings between heads of state to human rights. Although her upbringing and work led her to live in nine countries, she’s now based in New York. Her stories and short non-fictions works have thus far been published or will be published in SORTES Magazine and Microfiction Monday Magazine. She has appeared in a variety of podcasts and shows, including Tell Me About Your Father.
DO YOU HAVE A RAINCOAT? (Memoir) - The author’s memoir is equal parts a coming-of-age spy memoir and modern American history, using her experience growing up with a father in the CIA. The book follows the agency’s transformation from its OSS roots to its role as a subversive barrier against communism, from the perspective of an insider that’s also an outsider, to a degree, along with how to the agency’s identity as a more visible and controversial player in the fight against terrorism came to be. Being raised under the umbrella of the CIA was a mixture of stability and chaos, excitement and tedium, access, and denial. Growing up all over the world provided the author with an international scope, but through the narrow lens of a strictly American ideology. In the pages of this memoir, she travels the world, falls in and out of love, does some tangential spy work along the way (garnering her the unofficial the code name Yidlika II), all with the ever-present influence of the CIA over her life.
At 23, the author left her unofficial post at the Paris station, without ever looking back to tell her story. Do You have a Raincoat is a funny, warm, engaging story of a young woman growing up undercover. It is perfect for fans of The Liar’s Club, John Le Carre’s Cold War espionage novels, and more recently, memoirs such as Educated and The Princess Spy.
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, and his book My Grandmother and COVID-19 will be published in May 2022 by Arte Publico. He was recently chosen as a fellow at the Istanbul Fellowship. Airy has been invited to read from 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 Democratic Republic.
MI ABUELA Y COVID 19 | MY GRANDMOTHER AND COVID 19 (Arte Publico Press - The University of Texas, Oct. 2022) - The author’s debut children's picture book is a bilingual story of how COVID-19 changes a child's life and his relationship with his beloved grandmother, who falls ill.
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. Overall, though, the book will aim to capture what it feels like for Millennials to decide to start raising children against the backdrop of a world that feels like it could collapse at any moment due to a pandemic, climate change or your inability to get your newborn to eat vegetables and stress how sometimes the best way to deal with such an absurd situation is to laugh.
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.
NON-LINEAR
Non-Linear tells the story of the author’s non-linear journey through her 20s, through several experiences with love and sex and a love-hate relationship with power. Each story takes us through the categories, tropes, and identities we as a society pigeonhole women into: the precocious little girl, the teenage whore, the muse, the woman who sleeps with her boss to get ahead, the mistress, the femme fatale, the enigma, the soft woman, the badass woman, the mother-to-be. In physics, there is this concept called superposition which very basically states that one thing can be in several states at the same time, depending on the perspective. This book will lead the reader to question their reality and biases, understanding alongside the author–as she seeks to understand herself–that she can be all of these stereotypes and also none of them, depending on the perspective. Can a woman reach an equilibrium where tapping into a more vulnerable place feels natural–and not a fatal move because she’s not playing the capitalism game, or a backwards step towards becoming a docile possession to a powerful man? In this desired equilibrium, with knowledge of the world and awareness of herself, perhaps she can free herself from the guilt or shame, and not spend so much time becoming rigid and unfeeling and unfeminine. Maybe her freedom can be the way to take back her power. Now that she understands the tides and has the energy to swim back to shore, she can relax a bit into the pull of the ocean’s inevitable currents. This is a nonlinear story about growing up from girl to woman. It’s also a story about that woman remembering herself as a little girl. It’s about accepting and breaking free of the identities thrust onto many young women who are coming of age, regardless of what they look like.
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. He has covered Facebook’s, Google’s and TikTok’s algorithms, revealed conflicts of interest in the heart of the executive branch, and investigated decades-old infrastructure leaching toxic metal into the soil. His first book, Lessons and Carols was published in May of 2023 by Wm. B. Eerdmans. He holds an MFA in writing from Bennington College and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory.
FERTILE CIRCUITS (Debuts Spring 2026 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, along with any other snippers of noise he can catch throughout the day. 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
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