Nonprofit Publishing Since 1982
Aunt Lute Staff
Staff
​Joan Pinkvoss – Founder, Acting Co-CEO
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María Mínguez Arias – Operations Director, Acting Co-CEO
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Shay Brawn – Artistic Director
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Emma Rosenbaum – Programming and Acquisitions Director
Joan Pinkvoss
An MFA graduate of the University of Iowa’s Fiction Workshop, Joan
Pinkvoss has over 40 years’ experience in publishing and has won two
national publishing awards, as well as other awards honoring her
contribution to the arts. In 1989, Pinkvoss incorporated Aunt Lute Books
into the non-profit Aunt Lute Foundation—with a culturally diverse board, staff and intern program—to support literary narratives that are relevant to pressing community issues and to allow Aunt Lute Books to function in a larger national capacity. She has networked with scores of community organizations and hired consultants from within communities to produce accessible literary programs, panels and performances. She has also sat on national and local symposium panels, advocating for the importance of non-profit literature in a democratic and socially just world.
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.
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.
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.
