2012 Discover Award Judges

Hunger

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she teaches at and directs the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her collection Hunger, was a 1998 Discover Great New Writers selection, and her novel Inheritance won the PEN/Beyond Margins Prize for the Novel. Her most recent novel is All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost.  

The Light Possessed

Alan Cheuse

Alan Cheuse is the author of the novels The Bohemians, The Grandmothers' Club, The Light Possessed (a 1990 Discover selection) and the award-winning To Catch the Lightning, plus several collections of short fiction, including Songs of Slaves in the Desert and Paradise, or Eat Your Face. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, and elsewhere. As a book commentator, Cheuse has been a regular contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered since 1982. 

Matterhorn

Karl Marlantes

A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Karl Marlantes became a highly decorated Marine as a lieutenant in Vietnam, and is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, the novel Matterhorn (a 2010 Discover Great New Writers selection), and the non-fiction What It Is Like to Go To War. He lives in rural Washington State and is at work on his new novel.  

Louisa May Alcott

Susan Cheever

Susan Cheever is the author of Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, My Name is Bill and Home Before Dark, as well as five novels and four other works of nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Authors Guild Council and a member of the Yaddo Corporation.  

The Wilder Life

Wendy McClure

Wendy McClure is the author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, which was a 2011 Discover Great New Writers selection, and the memoir I'm Not the New Me. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and This American Life. She lives in Chicago, where she works as a children's book editor. 

The Portable Promised Land

Toure

Touré is the author of four books, including The Portable Promised Land, a 2002 Discover selection, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means To Be Black Now, which was named one of the Most Notable Books of 2011 by the New York Times and the Washington Post and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work of Non-Fiction, and the forthcoming I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became An Icon. He is the co-host of MSNBC's The Cycle and a columnist for Time.com.