Before co-founding Avid Reader Press in 2018, Ben Loehnen worked at the Simon & Schuster imprint for eight years, most recently as executive editor. He worked previously at HarperCollins and Random House. He edits books across a range of subjects, including business, economics, psychology, science, religion, fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir. The authors with whom he has worked include: Andy Borowitz, Frank Bruni, James Lee Burke, Steve Case, Helen Castor, Robert Cialdini, Ross Douthat, Jesse Eisinger, Charles Fishman, Justin Fox, Jacob Hacker, Morten Hansen, Oona Hathaway, Chip and Dan Heath, Virginia Heffernan, Adam Higginbotham, A.J. Jacobs, Kenn Kaufman, Ezra Klein, Sarah Lewis, Alec MacGillis, Paul Pierson, Gerald Posner, Richard Rhodes, Michael Riedel,  Jim Rogers, Christopher Ryan, Scott Shapiro, Dan Slater, Benn Steil, Andrew Sullivan, Gillian Tett, and Derek Thompson. A native of Montana and an avid birdwatcher, he is a graduate of Harvard College.

Before joining Avid Reader Press, where she oversees the imprint’s fiction and memoir program, Lauren spent more than two decades as an editor, first at Grove Atlantic, where she also served as rights director, and then at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Her recent publications include Awake by Jen Hatmaker (a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year, as well as Amazon’s #1 Memoir/Biography of 2025) and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (winner of the Women’s Prize for fiction, the Jewish Book Award, and Lambda Award, and finalist for the Booker Prize). She has also published two Reese’s Book Club selections—Group by Christie Tate and Infinite Country by Patricia Engel, both New York Times bestsellers. Other notable publications in recent years include Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth (one of Obama’s favorite books of 2022), Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (an Amazon best book of the month, Book of the Month main selection, and soon to be a Netflix series starring Rachel Weisz), Chloe Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game (an Amazon and People Magazine top-ten book of the year), and Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (a New York Times bestseller and an Amazon top-ten book of the year, with over 1 million copies sold to date).

Before joining Avid Reader Press, Caroline spent almost 15 years at the Penguin Publishing Group, most recently as editor-in-chief of Avery Books. She has also worked at Random House, Ballantine, HarperCollins, and Houghton Mifflin.  Focusing on nonfiction with a strong takeaway, she has edited many best sellers include The Book of Joy by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The End of Alzheimer's by Dale Bredesen, Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer, The Beauty of What Remains by Rabbi Steve Leder, The XX Brain by Lisa Mosconi, Mastering Diabetes by Cyrus Khambatta and Robby Barbaro, Lessons by Gisele Bündchen, Fat Chance by Robert Lustig, The First 20 Minutes by Gretchen Reynolds,  Mindset by Carol Dweck, and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley. Her other distinguished authors include Richard Davidson, Daniel Goleman, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Dean Ornish, Tara Parker-Pope, Deborah Tannen, David Kessler, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and Andrew Weil. A native New Yorker, she is a graduate of Harvard College, where she studied Comparative Literature.

Before joining Avid Reader Press in 2024, Shannon Welch was Editorial Director of Harper One, a division of HarperCollins. Previously she worked at Penguin Random House, Scribner, and Rodale Books. She edits a broad range of nonfiction with an emphasis on books that expand the mind, enhance the spirit, and foster a greater sense of connectedness. Some of her New York Times bestsellers include: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan, Relentless by Tim Grover, How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen by Joanna Faber and Julie King, and A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston. Other authors with whom she has worked include Cleo Wade, John and Julie Gottman, Adele Faber, Mary-Frances O’Connor, the estate of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Trevor Moawad, Susan Blum, Rosalynn Carter, Ross Greene, Laird Hamilton, Gabrielle Reece, Dr. Francine Shapiro, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and Jim VandeHei. Shannon is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in the Bay Area with her family.

Joy de Menil has worked at Random House, The Atlantic, Harvard University Press, and Viking, where she was Executive Editor for nine years. A nonfiction publisher with a passion for narrative history and big ideas that matter, she has published a number of award-winning, bestselling books including Andrew Roberts’s Churchill and Napoleon, Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets, Wars of the Roses and The Templars, Ned Johnson and William Stixrud’s The Self-Driven Child, Sonia Purnell’s Clementine and A Woman of No Importance, Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State, Joe Allen and John Macomber’s Healthy Buildings, Callum Roberts’ The Ocean of Life, Julian Jackson’s De Gaulle and France on Trial, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity, Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Other authors she has worked with include Mia Bay, James Hankins, Lee Hood, Robert Kaplan, Meagan McArdle, Arkady Ostrovsky, Richard Slotkin, Marcus du Sautoy, Ann Wroe, and Andrea Wulf. Her books have won the Bancroft Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Orwell Prize, Cundill Prize, Plutarch Prize, Baily Gifford Prize, Duff Cooper Prize, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among others. A committed composter and urban farmer, she lives with her family in Washington DC and is a trustee of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation and a member of the Washington Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Margo joined Avid Reader Press in 2022. Prior to that she was an editor at Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and a scout at Bettina Schrewe Literary Scouting. She acquires literary and upmarket fiction along with select memoir and narrative nonfiction. She has a soft spot for books that incorporate genre elements, humor, or the surreal, especially if they use them to ask provocative questions about contemporary culture. She also loves a classic multigenerational family saga or an elevated thriller, as long as the voice is distinctive and the story is immersive. Among her recent publications at Avid Reader are The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, a Good Morning America Book Club Pick and a New York Times bestseller, and To The Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. She also published the New York Times bestseller and Today Show Book Club pick Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood by Qian Julie Wang, the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Booker Prize-longlisted novels My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite and The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, which was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novel Award. Other authors she has edited include Aisha Abdel Gawad, Ariel Lawhon, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Ben Brooks, Betsy Cornwell, Christina Li, Douglas Westerbeke, Grace Flahive, Jessica Johns, Maya Kessler, Priya Guns, Rebecca Watson, Rebecca Novack, and Timothy Schaffert.