Meet the 2011 Discover Great New Writers Award Judges (Nonfiction)

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Dear Readers,

Yesterday we introduced you to our three judges for fiction, and today we're following up with our notable judges for Nonfiction.

Marie Arana is a Writer-at-Large at The Washington Post, and sits on the board of The National Book Festival, Washington, D.C. The daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother, she is the author of two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights, and a memoir, American Chica, which was a Discover selection and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001.  She is currently at work on a biography of Simón Bolívar.

John Freeman is the editor of Granta magazine, and a former president of the National Book Critics Circle. His criticism has appeared in the Guardian, The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. His first book, The Tyranny of E-mail, was a Discover selection in 2009.  He lives in New York and London.

Koren Zailckas was 23 when she wrote the international bestseller and 2005 Discover selection, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, an unapologetically candid and extremely controversial account of her experiences as an underage drinker.  The book sparked a national conversation about teenagers and alcohol, earning her literary praise, igniting talk show debates and helping to change national policy.  Her most recent book is Fury: A Memoir.  She lives with her family in the Catskills.

We'll post the shortlist here with comments from our judges on 2/1; Two winners (fiction and nonfiction) will each receive $10,000 from Barnes and Noble at a private event in New York on March 7th.

Cheers, Miwa

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Miwa Messer is the Director of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, which was established in 1990 to highlight works of exceptional literary quality that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book marketplace. Titles chosen for the program are handpicked by a select group of our booksellers four times a year. Click here for submission guidelines.