Board of Directors
Rowan Ricardo Phillips - President
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, author, academic, translator, journalist, and screenwriter. He is the author of three books of poetry and two books of non-fiction, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His screenplay for the film Clemente, based on Pulitzer-Prize winner David Maraniss' biography of baseball icon Roberto Clemente, is set to be directed by Oscar-winner Ezra Edelman. Phillips has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, the Pen/Joyce Osterweil Prize for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Award, Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award for Poetry. A prodigious sportswriter, Phillips has written on sports for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. His basketball writing has been collected by The Library of America’s seminal collection on the sport, Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game. His work has been selected as a book of the year by NPR, one of the best poetry collections of the year by The Washington Post, among others, and has been featured in Best American Poetry 2016 and Best American Poetry 2017. Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.
Mitzi Angel
Mitzi Angel is publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Previously, she was publisher of Faber and Faber in London. The authors she has worked with include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Bellos, Rachel Cusk, Garth Greenwell, John Lanchester, Ben Lerner, Yiyun Li, Sally Rooney, and Siddhartha Mukherjee. In 2011 she was joint winner (along with Lydia Davis) of the French-American Foundation Prize for her translation of 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat.
Ulrich Baer
Ulrich Baer attended Harvard College and Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. The recipient of Humboldt, Getty and Guggenheim Fellowships, he is University Professor at New York University where he teaches courses on literature, photography, art, and culture. He has published books on poetry, photography, and culture, and written for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Book Review. His translations of poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters are available as audiobooks read by Ethan Hawke and Rosanne Cash. He hosts the ideas podcasts, Think About It and The Proust Questionnaire, and has published editions of numerous classic, including Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, Beyond Good and Evil, Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, and others.
Robert Boynton
Robert S. Boynton is the director of NYU's Literary Reportage program and author of The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project (FSG, 2016) and The New New Journalism (Vintage, 2006). He has been an editor at Manhattan, inc. and Harper's magazines, and written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Lingua Franca, Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and many other publications.
Ava Chin
Ava Chin is the author of Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love, and the Perfect Meal (Simon & Schuster), winner of the M.F.K. Fisher Book award, and the editor of the anthology Split: Stories From a Generation Raised on Divorce (McGraw Hill). She has written for The New York Times ("Urban Forager"), The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Marie Claire, Saveur, SPIN, and VIBE, among others. Her fiction and poetry appear in Dick for a Day, It's Only Rock N Roll, Listen Up! Spoken Word Poetry, and A Gathering of the Tribes. She contributed lyrics to Soul Coughing’s El Oso (Warner Bros.).
Chin has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Nonfiction & Journalism at the City University of New York, and is currently working on a book about the Chinese Exclusion Act laws.
John Donatich
John Donatich has served as the Director of Yale University Press since 2003. He previously served as VP Publisher of Basic Books. He earned a BA and MA from New York University. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Village Voice and many other periodicals. He has published two books, Ambivalence, A Love Story and a novel, The Variations. He has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities, and was recently awarded a fellowship by the Corporation of Yaddo. He lives in New Haven, CT and New York, NY. He is married to writer, agent, editor Betsy Lerner and father to Raffaella Donatich.
Tim Duggan
Tim Duggan is an executive editor at Holt. He was previously an editor at Crown and Harper. The authors he has worked with include Hilary Mantel, Timothy Snyder, David Wallace-Wells, Michiko Kakutani, Karan Mahajan, Daniel Mendelsohn, William Boyd, Annie Dillard, and Uzodinma Iweala. The books he has edited include winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and multiple finalists for the National Book Award.
Ben Kafka
Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Greenwich Village. Originally trained as a historian, he was on the faculty of NYU for many years; he is now affiliated with the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 2007, and a member of its board since 2012. He also serves on the board of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012) and is currently at work on a book about how other people drive us crazy.
Sarah McNally
Sarah McNally is the owner and operator of McNally Jackson Books, and independent bookstore with shops on Prince Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, South Street Seaport and The Shed at Hudson Yards.
Eric Banks - Director
Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, is a writer and editor based in New York. A former senior editor of Artforum, Banks was editor in chief of Bookforum from 2003–2008. From 2011 to 2013, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle and was a two-term member of the NBCC board of directors as well as chair of its award committees on Biography and Criticism. He was a judge of the Pulitzer Prize committees in Fiction in 2017 and 2020 and was chair of the judges committee in 2017.
Banks’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Financial Times, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, Aperture, Town and Country, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has contributed essays to monographs on a number of artists, including Franz West, Christopher Wool, and Grant Wood. Additionally, he has edited numerous catalogs and collections of artists writings and is the consulting editor of the Robert Rauschenberg Catalogue Raisonné.
Bruce Rabb - Board Adviser/Secretary
Bruce Rabb is a lawyer and human rights advocate. He currently serves on the boards of Cinereach, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Make Music Matter USA, and War Childhood, and is a Director Emeritus and Secretary of Human Rights Watch where he also serves as Co-Chair of the LGBT Division Advisory Committee and Vice Chair of the Middle East North Africa Division Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, and the New York City Bar Association where he serves on the Council on International Affairs.
Friends of the NYIH
Vasily Andreev
Raphael Bejarano
Anne Simone Kleinman and Thomas Wong
George Sheanshang
Margaret Sundell