The Inkluded Team
The Board
Michael Mejias
Executive Director and Academy Committee Head
Michael Mejias has been at Writers House for over two decades and is the founder and director of both the Writers House Intern Program (WHIP) and the Writers House Mentor Initiative (WHMI). Through these programs, he’s facilitated the placement of over 750 young people in their first publishing jobs, with a third of those placements being from BIPoC spaces.
Additionally, Mr. Mejias is the founding executive director of Inkluded and the principal designer of Inkluded Academy, a free publishing course for BIPoC publishing aspirants.
Mr. Mejias is also the co-founder and executive director of the Dramatic Question Theatre (DQT), a company dedicated to developing and presenting plays written by BIPoC and Female-identifying playwrights.
He’s from the West Farms housing projects in the South Bronx.
Julia Kardon
Julia Kardon was born and raised in New York City. Her first job in publishing, while in high school, was shelving fiction at the fabled Strand Bookstore. After receiving degrees in Comparative Literature, as well as in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago, she moved to Prague to teach English for a year. Julia then returned to New York to restart her career in publishing. She joined HSG in 2018 after building a list at Mary Evans Inc and handling foreign rights. Her clients include New York Times Best Seller Brit Bennett, Barnes & Noble Discover picks John Freeman Gill, Leah Franqui, and Etaf Rum, Center For Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow Melissa Rivero, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and others.
Mackenzie Brady Watson
Mackenzie has been an agent with the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency since 2016. Prior to that, she was an agent with New Leaf Literary + Media and Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. Her clients have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List, and have been winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award, LA Times Book Prize, ALA Carnegie Medal, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award, and the Black Caucus of the ALA Award and finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the the Lambda Literary Award. She represents investigative journalism, history, hybrid memoir, poetry, upmarket adult fiction and graphic books. She particularly appreciates work that explores today’s most pressing issues through a compelling story and can be used as tools for social change.
Leadership
Cecilia Gray
Director of Operations
Cecilia Gray is a Production Editor at Simon & Schuster.
For the past decade, she has been passionate about and active in her work to amplify diverse voices in publishing, both as it pertains to authors and professionals in the industry. Through her three years of full-time work at Simon & Schuster, her freelance proofreading career, and her internships with Writers House, Simon & Schuster, Folio, Foundry, and The Strand Magazine, she has helped publish over 100 stories that achieve this mission. And her career is only beginning! When she’s not working, she’s probably planning her next trip, going for a swim, or unabashedly rewatching her favorite sitcoms and rom-coms.
Karen van de Vrande
Grants Manager
Karen van de Vrande is helping Girls Write Now raise funds to grow and expand their successful programs. After a long career in corporate management with AT&T, RSL Communications, and Nielsen, Karen was living the life of leisure when the siren song of nonprofit fundraising led her to begin grant writing for a theater group in New York City and then for several other nonprofits across the United States. Having had her own foundation for many years, one priority of which was funding young people and the arts, and being on several nonprofit boards herself, she knows how challenging it is to raise money and wants to do what she can to help.
Alexandra Hightower
Membership Committee Head
An Atlanta native, Alexandra took a circuitous route to publishing. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in neuroscience, and then, realizing her passion lay closer to books, she pursued a Master’s degree in Publishing, Print and Digital Media from New York University. Currently, she is a Senior Editor at Little Brown Books for Young Readers (Hachette Book Group) and is actively acquiring picture books, middle grade, and young adult titles. Recent highlights from her list include the Newbery Award winner Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson, We Are Not Broken by George M. Johnson, and the CSK Award winning picture book The Me I Choose to Be by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley and Kahran and Regis Bethencourt. Previous to joining Hachette, she worked in editorial at Delacorte Press (Penguin Random House) and was a Summer 2016 intern at Writers House.
Nazli Islam
Programs Committee Head
Nazli Islam is from Gainesville, Florida, but currently lives in New York City. She attended Inkluded Academy as a matriculant in 2021. She works as Production Associate in reprints at Penguin Random House.
Yuna Shprecher
Social Media Director
An Inkluded Academy matriculant from 2024, Yuna Shprecher is originally from Phoenix, Arizona. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in English and American Studies and is currently a publicity and marketing intern at Grove Atlantic. Her favorite sort of books are short story collections and memoirs. Beyond books, she enjoys going to the movies using her AMC Stubs A-list membership, telling everyone she knows to get the AMC membership, and eating everything bagels in the park. Yuna is the Social Media Director for Inkluded.
Members
Sofia Bolido
Sofia is a Global Licensing and Media Rights Assistant at Writers House. Prior to this she's worked at Publishers Weekly's The Millions, Radish Fiction, Foundry Literary + Media, and Hunter College’s German department. She loves to read stories and poetry that show the nuance of identity & human experience, particularly those written by people of color. Some other things that bring her joy include swimming, yoga, fashion, and a good cup of black coffee. She was a matriculant of the Inkluded Academy Class of 2021 and is currently on the Inkluded Programs Committee.
Sacha Chadwick
A New York native and proud Brooklynite, Sacha is currently a Publicity and Trade Marketing Assistant for Oxford University Press. She received a double Bachelor’s from Mercyhurst University in Criminal Justice and Asian Studies, a Master of Arts in International Crime and Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a Master of Arts in Publishing from George Washington University. Sacha has found her home in the publishing industry and is always trying to find ways to diversify the industry one step at a time. When she’s not writing copy or press releases, she’s playing video games, reading manga, and keeping up with all media and industry news.
Erica Huang
Erica is a Production Assistant at Artisan Books, a cooking and lifestyle imprint of Workman Publishing. She is interested in the hands-on work of book production and printing, and her favorite feeling is receiving the finished copies of a book after months of production. A long-time lover of sci-fi and fantasy, Erica is currently discovering a new love for narrative nonfiction, and is on the lookout for new memoirs and essay collections by people of color. Outside of reading, her interests include testing recipes from her imprint's variety of cookbooks and watching mukbangs online. Erica is part of the Inkluded Academy Committee.
Danner Jaundoo-Baker
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Danner is a book person through and through. Her love for books began in the old halls of the Los Angeles Central Library, where she spent hours devouring coming-of-age and fantasy novels. Danner went on to study English at the University of San Francisco with a concentration in writing, where she also worked as a peer mentor to other students and as an associate at the African-American Shakespeare Company. After graduating, Danner worked at a nonprofit committed to increasing funding for minority artists. She currently works as a member of the operations team at Participant, a production company dedicated to socially conscious storytelling. Whilst not at work, she can be found at the beach, rain or shine. She loves to read romance, books about women, and nonfiction.
Maya Lewis
Originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, Maya is a Marketing Coordinator for HarperCollins Publishing (Amistad, HarperVia, and HarperCollins Español) living in Brooklyn. She studied English Literature and Sociology before receiving her master's in journalism from the City University of New York, where she focused on culture writing and documentary film. Maya is also a poet, mixed-media artist, and the co-founder of the NONAC, a bi-monthly literary newsletter. She loves Afrofuturism, ceramics, suspense thrillers, and matcha. Maya is part of the Inkluded Social Media Committee.
Danielle Maldonado
Danielle Maldonado is the assistant managing editor at Levine Querido, an independent publisher focusing on historically underrepresented voices. She has a background in magazine publishing and project management. Danielle obtained her BA in Comparative Literature and Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara and completed the Inkluded Academy in 2022. She believes a good book at the right age can evoke curiosity, inspire empathy, and cement a love for reading. Her favorite reading spot is on her couch, nestled between her two dogs.
Maia Menschik
Maia's love for books can be traced back to when she was growing up in Argentina, always reading or engrossed in her own writing. Before moving to New York and joining the publishing industry, Maia lived in Buenos Aires, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and worked in music law, academic research, business consulting, and tech. Maia holds a Bachelor degree in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and has always been fascinated by stories that explore the dark side of human psychology. As a life-long outsider, she knows the importance of representation, diversity, and inclusion in all walks of life, but particularly in the written word and the industry that facilitates it. Maia works in the Contracts Department at Simon & Schuster and is part of the Inkluded Academy Committee.
Mia Roman
Mia is a literary agent, rights agent and founder of Roman Lit where she happily handles a varied list of fiction and nonfiction for all markets. In her previous life, she was a journalist in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she was born and raised. However, her love of books could not be curtailed, so she moved to New York to pursue her Master of Science in Publishing at Pace University, and started her career in publishing with an internship at Writers House, and then worked in the rights department at New Leaf Literary & Media before moving back to Brazil to open her own agency.
TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter
TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter is a Queer Black author born in Modesto, California. He is a Fiction Editor with The Ana Literary Magazine and has worked in the magazine sphere for six years. He holds a MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University, where he fell in love with Publishing. In his free time he can be found playing video games, binging TV, or writing his next Young Adult novel.
Jiayun Yang
Jiayun Yang is the literary coordinator at production and IP creation company Assemble Media, shepherding literary projects and scouting for IP with great potential for adaptation. She also worked under the media and foreign rights department at Sourcebooks before. She is passionate about bringing books to the screen and to other mediums and languages. She speaks Spanish and Mandarin as well. She lives in NYC now but has also lived and worked in China, Argentina, and Colombia.