Aunt Lute Staff
Staff
Isis Asare - Executive Director
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Joan Pinkvoss – Co-Founder, Former Executive Director, Consultant
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Shay Brawn - Artistic Director
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María Mínguez Arias - Operations Director
Emma Rosenbaum - Programming and Acquisitions Director
Bianca Hernandez-Knight - Marketing Director
Interns
Evelyn Kuo
Isis Asare
A citizen of the world, Isis was born to Ghanaian immigrants in Harlem. Isis currently resides in Oakland, CA with their supportive and evolving polycule. Isis is an alum of Stanford University, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and Columbia Business School.
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Joan Pinkvoss
Coming soon.​
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Shay Brawn
Shay Brawn has been the managing editor at Aunt Lute Books since1996. She received her BA in English from Yale University and PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she has taught writing and rhetoric for more than three decades. In all of her work, whether in teaching or publishing, she is committed to helping others develop their voices and tell their stories, especially those stories that have been neglected, silenced, and otherwise marginalized within publishing and academia.
María Mínguez Arias
María Mínguez Arias is a fiction and non-fiction bilingual writer, translator, and journalist born in Spain and residing in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their two young adult children. She is the author of Nombrar el cuerpo (2022) named among the Best Queer Lit of the year in Spain by Revista Qué Leer, the Int’l Latino Book Award winning novel Patricia sigue aquí (2018), and co-editor of #NiLocasNiSolas: narrativa escrita por mujeres en Estados Unidos (2023). Her essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals in the US, Spain, and Mexico. She is an active member of the #NewLatinoBoom, a movement of contemporary writing in Spanish out of the United States. Working at Aunt Lute feels perfectly aligned with her mission of widening the space where literature exists, because in her opinion, it has been way too narrow for way too long.
Emma Rosenbaum
Emma Rosenbaum (she/her) is a mixed race, cis femme, interdisciplinary arts professional based in the Bay Area. Her personal arts practice spans creative writing to sewing to playing the ukuleles her grandpa makes. She received her Bachelors in English at UC Berkeley, where she studied creative writing with acclaimed authors including Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Hass, Georgina Kleege, and Melanie Abrams. She began her career screenwriting for a Tanzanian soap opera and then transitioned into the fine art world, doing art writing and curation. As the winner of the 2016 Roselyn Schneider Eisner Fiction Prize, Emma is published in several literary magazines and publications including The Daily Californian and The Weekender. She was a 2019/2020 Emerging Arts Professional Fellow. Today, Emma splits her time between Aunt Lute Books, an intersectional feminist nonprofit publisher where she is the Director of Programs and Acquisitions, and Southern Exposure, where she is the Marketing and Communications Coordinator. She continues to develop her career at the intersection of the arts and social justice, with a commitment to beauty as truth, contradiction, and story.
Bianca Hernandez-Knight
Social media mage by day, and nerd of many fandoms by night, Bianca is a lady of many interests. From fighting for a more inclusive Jane Austen community, to ignoring her TBR pile, she's always ready for her next nerdy project. On weekends she can be found designing costumes or bothering her rabbits.
Evelyn Kuo
Evelyn Kuo (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, and theater artist born and raised in the Bay Area (Ohlone Land). She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in English and minors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). While at Stanford, she also served as the Executive Producer of the Asian American Theater Project. She was one of five fellows selected for The Layar Project's inaugural AAPI Script Lab in 2023. She is currently working as a marketing intern at Aunt Lute Books.
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