nonfiction
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The Prison-Doc Shop That Made 40 Years of Payroll Selling Stories Nobody Else Would Touch
For four decades, Rasha and Stephanie Drachkovitch have run toward the subjects most producers avoid - prisons, night shifts, grief - and turned them into shows that networks keep ordering.
Spiegel & Grau
Spiegel & Grau is a New York independent, multi-platform publisher founded by veteran editors Celina 'Cindy' Spiegel and Julie Grau. After Penguin Random House shuttered their acclaimed imprint in 2019, the pair relaunched as an indie house in 2021, deliberately capping their list at 15-20 books a year so each title gets full editorial care across print, audio, podcast, and screen. The house treats a story as an asset to be developed across formats rather than a single book to be printed, and its very first independent release, Catherine Raven's 'Fox and I,' hit the New York Times bestseller list out of the gate.
Cindy Spiegel
Cindy Spiegel (born Celina Spiegel) is a New York book publisher and co-founder, with Julie Grau, of the independent press Spiegel & Grau. Over three decades she helped build Riverhead Books and the original Spiegel & Grau imprint, editing and launching authors including Khaled Hosseini, James McBride, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Trevor Noah and Piper Kerman. After Penguin Random House shut their imprint in 2019, the two partners rebuilt the company from scratch in 2020 as an independent house that pairs books with audio, podcasts and a first-look film and television deal.
Stephanie Chandler
Stephanie Chandler is an American author, entrepreneur, and community builder who traded a Silicon Valley software career for a bookstore, stumbled into publishing, and ended up founding the Nonfiction Authors Association — a membership community helping writers publish, market, and monetize nonfiction books. Author of ten books and founder of Authority Publishing, she runs the annual Nonfiction Writers Conference (since 2010) and advocates openly for suicide loss survivors.
Freddie deBoer
Freddie deBoer is an American author, cultural critic, and PhD-wielding contrarian who has spent 17 years making everyone on the internet uncomfortable - including people who agree with him. A self-described Marxist who despises most of the left, his Substack newsletter 'cool but rude' has over 67,000 subscribers hungry for unvarnished takes on education, identity politics, media dysfunction, and mental illness. Author of three books - The Cult of Smart (2020), How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023), and debut novel The Mind Reels (2025) - deBoer writes with the conviction of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Joanne McNeil
Joanne McNeil is an American writer, editor, and art critic who sits at the curious crossroads of internet culture and contemporary art. Best known for 'Lurking: How a Person Became a User' (2020) - a critical history of the internet told from the perspective of ordinary users - she followed it with her debut novel 'Wrong Way' (2023), a tech-industry satire about precarious gig labor. Formerly editor of Rhizome at the New Museum and founder of The Tomorrow Museum blog, she has written for Frieze, Wired, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. She holds the inaugural Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation Arts Writing Award and has been a fellow at the Logan Nonfiction Program, a resident at Eyebeam, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Her next nonfiction work, 'Too Early for the Future,' is forthcoming from MCD/FSG.