COO and Publisher

Ben Schrank

(he/him/his)

Ben Schrank is publisher of Astra House and COO of Astra Publishing House. Ben was previously president and publisher at Henry Holt & Company and prior to that, president and publisher of Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House. At Astra, Ben has acquired fiction and nonfiction, including THE BATHYSPHERE BOOK by Brad Fox, SEEING by Chai Jing, and THIEVING SUN by Monica Datta, as well as other works by Daniel Gumbiner, Royal Society of Literature Encore award winner Daisy Hildyard, August Prizewinner Lydia Sandgren and 20th Century renowned Chinese novelist and essayist Wang Xiaobo. Upcoming books include and MRS. LILIENBLUM’S CLOUD FACTORY by Iddo Gefen and FORECLOSURE GOTHIC by Harris Lahti.

You can reach him at bschrank@astrapublishinghouse.com

Marketing Manager

Tiffany Gonzalez

(she/her/hers)

Tiffany Gonzalez is the Marketing Manager at Astra House, where she has created marketing campaigns for Tyriek White’s award-winning debut novel We Are a Haunting, Alejandro Varela’s National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon, Esther Yi’s The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize finalist Y/N, and Andrea Abreu’s Dogs of Summer (translated by Julia Sanches), among many others. She previously worked in Production at HarperCollins Publishers and currently volunteers on the board for Latinx In Publishing. She was a 2022 Publishers Weekly Rising Star Honoree.

Publicity Director

Rachael Small

(she/her/hers)

Rachael Small is the director of publicity at Astra House and Astra Publishing House. At Astra, she has led campaigns for Alba de Céspedes’s New York Times Notable Forbidden Notebook (translated by Ann Goldstein), Tyriek White’s award-winning debut novel We Are a Haunting, Jesse Katz’s The Rent Collectors, and Andrea Abreu’s Dogs of Summer (translated by Julia Sanches), among others. She previously directed publicity for Europa Editions, where she led campaigns for numerous bestselling and beloved novels, including Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults and The Story of the Lost Child (translated by Ann Goldstein). She is also an accomplished literary translator who has edited translations of novels by Négar Djavadi, Canék Sanchez Guevara, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and her translation of Abdellah Taïa’s short story collection, Another Morocco (Semiotext(e)) was dubbed a “notable translation” by World Literature Today.

Senior Publicist

Alexis Nowicki

(she/her/hers)

Alexis Nowicki is the senior publicist at Astra House, where she has led publicity campaigns for Esther Yi’s Center for Fiction First Novel Prize finalist Y/N, Brad Fox’s National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award–winner The Bathysphere Book, Sean Michaels’s Do You Remember Being Born?, Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, and many others. She previously worked in the publicity department at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she led campaigns for books including Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment, Jonathan Slaght’s Owls of the Eastern Ice, Jacqueline Rose’s On Violence and On Violence Against Women, Tamara Shopsin’s LaserWriter II, and francine j. harris’s Here is the Sweet Hand. Originally from Michigan, she now resides in Brooklyn.

Junior Designer

Frankie DiGiovanni

(she/her/hers)

Frankie DiGiovanni is the junior designer at Astra House and Astra Publishing House. At Astra House, she has worked on covers for Joni Murphy’s Barbara, Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties, Lauren Haddad’s Fireweed, and Alba de Céspedes’s Her Side of the Story, among others. She previously was a design intern at Rodrigo Corral Studio.

Editorial Director

Emily Bell

She/Her/Hers

Emily Bell is the editorial director of Astra House. Previously she was the head of editorial at Zando where she edited Steve Almond’s All the Secrets of the World, Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, Alina Grabowski’s Women and Children First, and Holly Wilson’s Kittentits, among other titles. She also curated and published the Atlantic editions, a publishing partnership with The Atlantic magazine. Prior to Zando, Emily spent a decade at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, most recently as an executive editor and the director of the paperback original line, FSG Originals, which launched early work from Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey, and Laura van den Berg. She has edited and published bestselling and award-winning fiction and nonfiction, including Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State, Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League, and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley. At Astra, Emily acquires literary fiction and select narrative nonfiction. Her forthcoming titles include Lori Ostlund’s Are You Happy?, Erin Maglaque’s Pure Presence, and Delaney Nolan’s Happy Bad.

Associate Editor

Tara Sharma

She/Her/Hers

Tara Sharma is an associate editor at Astra House. Previously, she was an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she worked on a range of award-winning and bestselling publications by authors including Rachel Aviv, David Graeber, Oliver Burkeman, Judith Butler, James Bridle, and Andrea Long Chu; acquired nonfiction, fiction and poetry by Christina Sharpe and Tove Ditlevsen; edited manuscripts by John Cassidy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Angela Garcia, and Dionne Brand; and steered the committee for the FSG Writer’s Fellowship. She received a degree in English and Science & Technology Studies from Brown University.

Across nonfiction, fiction and poetry, Tara is drawn to formally inventive, stylish, genre-blurring books that catalyze relationships between different knowledge systems; test narrative; bend and collapse scales; and reveal something new about perception, relation, language, and meaning-making. She especially enjoys when this sort of work is deeply researched—rooted in history, philosophy, art and cultural criticism, the environmental humanities, left politics, and science and technology. She’s interested in writers with specialized backgrounds—scholarly or otherwise—who have strong, curious voices and surprising formal impulses, and who are committed to translating technical ideas into everyday, sensory language. She’s keen to build a list of “ecological” writing across form and genre.

At Astra, Tara’s authors include Morgan Day, Esther Yi, Ann Scott, Ben Eastham, Eliana Alves Cruz, Julia Kornberg, Adrian Hon, Rebecca Heilweil, Esra Padgett, Jack Balderamma Morley, Fátima Vélez, and Lydia Sandgren.   

Associate Editor

Maya Raiford Cohen

She/Her/Hers

Maya Raiford Cohen is an associate editor interested in politically attentive and progressive literary fiction and serious nonfiction, including criticism, history, and investigative journalism. She loves ambitious projects with a strong political point of view that have something inventive and essential to argue about capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, race, gender and geography. She’s always excited to read books about the workplace and labor; campus novels; speculative or dystopian fiction; books about or set in California and/or the American west; books about violence and its transmutability; and books about or within the world of sports. 

She was previously an assistant editor and executive coordinator at Zando where she edited and published multiple titles for the Atlantic Editions imprint, a collaboration between The Atlantic Magazine and Zando, and worked on a number of fiction and non-fiction titles including Yeji Y. Ham’s The Invisible Hotel, Holly Wilson’s Kittentits, and Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility. Maya graduated from Yale University with a degree in Ethnicity, Race and Migration in 2021, where she also worked as an Acquisitions Intern at Yale University Press.

Editor

Patrizia van Daalen

She/ her/ hers

Patrizia van Daalen is editor at Astra House. Previously she was Publishing Director at Penguin Random House China where she oversaw the Chinese and English language publishing operation. Prior to that Patrizia was managing acquisitions at Shanghai 99 Readers, a Chinese publisher specialized in literary fiction where acquisitions included Nobel Prizes like Patrick Modiano or JMG Le Clezio, as well as literary sensations like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or the Napoli Trilogy by Elena Ferrante.

As an italo-german who grew up in France and lived most of her adult life in China, Patrizia is interested in expanding Astra House’s list of fiction and non-fiction in translation, looking for stories which might make us think about what is surprisingly familiar and refreshingly new in stories translated from other languages and cultures. Titles at Astra include My Men by Victoria Kielland, Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, and forthcoming, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan.