Hub City Press National Advisory Council

For thirty years, Hub City Press has championed the finest voices of the American South, bringing urgent, unforgettable books to national and international acclaim. As one of the most respected small independent presses in the country, we’ve launched careers, nurtured talent, and expanded the conversation about what Southern literature can be. 

This year, we formed our first-ever National Advisory Council, a small, distinguished group of authors and literary leaders whose influence and insight will help guide our next chapter. Together, we'll continue to shape the future of independent publishing at a time when it is most under threat, and advocate for new voices, editorial care, and the importance of literature in our divided cultural landscape. 

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Council Members
 

Neema Avashia

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (West Virginia University Press, 2022), was named a best LGBTQ+ memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the New England Book Award, and the Weatherford Award.

 

 

 

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Cinelle Barnes 

Cinelle Barnes is a formerly undocumented memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir, Malaya: Essays on Freedom, and A Way Home, and editor of A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South. Her writing has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Longreads, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed Reader, Literary Hub, Coastal Living, Travel + Leisure, and CNN Philippines, among others. Cinelle was a contributing editor and instructor at Catapult, and she served as a juror for the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Memoir. A brain aneurysm survivor, she sits on the Brain Injury Leadership Council of South Carolina.

 

 

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Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels: When Ghosts Come Home, The Last Ballad, This Dark Road to Mercy, and A Land More Kind Than Home. Cash’s short stories and essays have appeared in The Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Our State Magazine, and other publications, and his fiction has been adapted for the stage and film. He has taught creative writing and literature at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Bethany College, the University of North Carolina-Asheville, and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He’s been a fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and he teaches fiction writing and literature at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, where he serves as the Executive Director of the Literary Arts. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their daughters.

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John T. Edge

John T Edge, author of House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home, writes and hosts the television show TrueSouth which broadcasts via the SEC Network and ESPN and streams via ESPN, Hulu, and Disney. A widely published magazine writer, he serves Garden & Gun as a columnist and is author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. In 1998, he founded the Southern Foodways Symposium at the University of Mississippi. From 1999 through 2021, Edge directed the Southern Foodways Alliance. Edge teaches narrative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Georgia. At the University of Mississippi, he directs the Mississippi Lab, where he leads the development of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on William Faulkner’s onetime mule farm. Edge also serves as writer-in-residence for the Department of Writing and Rhetoric and teaches a class on writing and reading place. Edge lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his wife, the artist Blair Hobbs.

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Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is the New York Times–bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist three times for the National Book Award. She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Guggenheim Foundation, was given the Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list in 2024. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.

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Ashley M. Jones

Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022-2026). She is the first person of color and youngest person in Alabama’s history to hold this position, which was created in 1930. Jones is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lullaby for the Grieving. She is the author of the essay collection What the Mirror Said: The Necessity of Women in Poetry, and she is the co-editor of What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People. Her poems are published in many journals and publications, including POETRY, Academy of American Poets, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Oxford American, and her work has been featured by outlets including PBS, CNN, The BBC, Good Morning America, ABC News, and the New York Times. Jones is the Associate Director of the University Honors Program at UAB, the executive director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she is a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University.

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Lauren LeBlanc

Lauren LeBlanc is a writer and editor whose essays, interviews, and criticism have been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the Believer, the Drift, Oxford American, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Previously, she worked in editorial for the Times-Picayune, Alfred A. Knopf, Atlas & Co., and Guernica Magazine. An elected board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but was born and raised in New Orleans. 

 

 

 

 

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Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run, Perpetual West, and Shae. Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.

 

 

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José Olivarez
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, and the author of two collections of poems, including, most recently, Promises of Gold—which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Awards. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. Along with Felicia Rose Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Alongside Antonio Salazar, he published the hybrid book, Por Siempre in 2023. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He has presented at universities including Northwestern University, The University of Missouri- Kansas City, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, SUNY College at Geneseo, Napa Valley College and more. 

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Carter Sickels

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, published by Hub City Press, and winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award. The Prettiest Star was also selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour, an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. His essays and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Joyland, Guernica, Catapult, and Electric Literature. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. He is an assistant professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.

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John Jeremiah Sullivan

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and co-founder of the nonprofit research collective Third Person Project. He is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son and Pulphead: Essays, named a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and Best American Essays. Sullivan has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Magazine Awards, a 2004 Whiting Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a James Beard Award. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he now lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

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Michael Taeckens

The co-founder of Broadside PR and a literary agent at Massie McQuilkin & Altman, Michael Taeckens has three decades of experience working in the publishing industry. His clients have been awarded and shortlisted for major international literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Booker Prize, Lambda Literary Award, NAACP Image Award, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and more, and have been featured regularly in national media. Michael received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2015 he co-founded Broadside PR with his esteemed colleagues, Kimberly Burns and Whitney Peeling, and in 2025 he joined Massie & McQuilkin as a literary agent.

 

 

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Kevin Wilson
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine, and five novels, The Family Fang, Perfect Little World, Nothing to See Here, a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection, Now is Not the Time to Panic and Run for the Hills.  His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012.  He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English & Creative Writing Department at the University of the South.