Meet the jury for the 2024 prize season

Islam Aly

Islam Aly is a book artist and papermaker. His artists’ books explore the possibilities of historical bindings in contemporary book art practice combining book traditions with digital technologies and investigating the relationships between content and context. His work is held in collections worldwide, including The Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of African Art, The British Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina Book Arts Collection, and the National Library of Chile. He currently is a lecturer of Design in the College of Art Education at Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt.

Lauren Burke

Lauren Burke is a writer and host of the podcast Bonnets at Dawn, which is about the lives and works of 18th, 19th, and 20th-century women writers. She loves travel, history, and can often be found in a museum archive looking at old books. Lauren lives in Chicago with her husband, daughter, and pup and is also the author of Her Story: Rosa Parks and Why She Wrote.

Angelina Coronado

Angelina Coronado is a PhD student at Columbia University studying migratory narratives in European literature. She loves reading and collecting books by women writers of the nineteenth-century to the contemporary moment.

Sara Powell

Sara Powell is Assistant Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library at Harvard University. She holds an MS in Library & Information Science from Simmons University and MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York.

Bridgett Kathryn Johnson-Pride

Bridgett Kathryn Johnson-Pride (she/her) is the Interim Associate Librarian for Public Services at Houghton Library at Harvard University, a member of the inaugural class of Cultural Heritage fellows for Rare Book School, and an artist who enjoys teaching with primary sources and empowering young learners to embark on personal discovery in the archives. Bridgett received her MLIS, and MA in History from Simmons University in 2018. Bridgett studies 19th and 20th-century American culture, especially relating to intersectional identities with gender, race, and class.