How the LA Review of Books destroyed itself

“All non-profits run on exploitation, but these guys don’t even try to hide it."

This is a special edition of No Bad Days. There are a few links at the bottom to read if you don’t care for niche lit-media drama!

Image via Jack Skelley’s Instagram

In 2024, almost exactly two years ago, Los Angeles writer and The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker author Jack Skelley co-hosted a Valentine’s Day event called “House of Pies” at the Los Angeles Review of Books office in Koreatown.

“It was just a poetry reading,” a former LARB editor told me. “But it’s LA and, you know, 90% of the poets are sex workers and strippers.” That included Jack’s event co-host Lily Lady, a multidisciplinary artist and writer.

The event was part of a LARB effort to foster “goodwill” with LA’s broader literary community by loaning out their office to writers and poets for readings, talks, and other events. Although not an official LARB event, a LARB employee nonetheless posted about it on their official channels. An Instagram story went up, documenting what’s called a “pie-sit” with a cream pie (you can use your imagination as I have been unable to get a straight answer from anyone involved about what a pie-sit is—please sound off in the comments). (Update, 3:02 PM: A pie-sit, according to one commenter and an image Lily Lady posted to IG, is when a beautiful woman sits on a pie and dances on it.)

According to those familiar with the situation, this is the IG story that made then newly-installed LARB editor-in-chief Medaya Ocher lose it. “Medaya called an all-staff meeting,” one former editor tells me. “And she was like, ‘This is inappropriate, it’s disgusting. It’s demeaning.’ And we were all like openly like, what the fuck are you talking about? This is an arts organization.” They say Medaya objected to LARB being associated with “prostitution or sex work.”

The main target of Medaya’s ire was then-managing editor Chloe Watlington, who told others in the office that she had received dozens of frantic texts from Medaya over the weekend. According to a former employee, Medaya and executive director Irene Yoon called Chloe in for a meeting and then fired her.

But the former employees claim Chloe’s firing wasn’t about the pie-sit. What got Chloe fired, they say, had far more to do with a pattern of workplace aggression, wage exploitation, and clashes over how the outlet covered the genocide in Gaza.

Maybe you’ve already seen this tweet by Ellie Eberlee, the now-former managing editor (Watlington’s replacement) of the LA Review of Books. Last week Ellie resigned from her position, becoming “the 5th senior+ editor to leave in 3 years, and the 4th staff member in 6 months,” she wrote. “pay your staff and contributors. fix the way you treat people or die.”

I’ve been hearing stories about the LA Review of Books’ managerial dysfunction for years now, but the truth is, the publication has never mattered enough for any drama to boil over publicly (despite the valiant efforts of some of the writers and editors who’ve passed through there). “The best thing the founders of the LA Review of Books did was name it,” one former editor tells me, “because the name gave it a sense of tradition and belonging in this milieu of publications it just does not belong in.”

I collected accounts from six former employees who worked or interned at the LA Review of Books at different times between 2021 and 2026 about their experiences at the non-profit. They describe an organization experiencing broader workplace dysfunction. “All non-profits run on exploitation, but these guys don’t even try to hide it,” an editor tells me.

I reached out to LARB and former EIC Michelle Chihara with an exhaustive list of the claims made in the first part of this article, asking them for confirmation or context. Michelle did not get back to me. Executive director Irene Yoon replied to me with this note:

Your questions relate to confidential personnel and business matters, and thus we cannot respond to them in detail. But we do not agree with the characterization of the vast majority of these claims, many of which are demonstrably false or purposely misleading. LARB has an amazing staff of talented employees and wonderful contributors. We work very hard to provide the highest quality of writing and programming for our readers and students and to treat employees and contributors with respect and support. As a reader-supported nonprofit, we are committed to continuing this important work amidst an extremely challenging time for the arts and media.

I followed up, again, and received no response to my request for clarification on some of the more shocking—and easily verifiable—claims made by LARB’s former employees.

Before we get into all that, a little history: The Los Angeles Review of Books (then hosted on Tumblr) was founded in 2011 by nonfiction author and creative writing professor Tom Lutz, with funding from UC Riverside and a number of other funds and private donors. At the time, he told Publisher’s Weekly he wanted LARB to “become the best-paying book review outlet around.” (Reader, you won’t believe what happened next.)

The people I spoke to all blamed Tom’s “section editor model” as one of the root causes of the org’s dysfunction. The section editors, a mix of volunteers and contractors, all commissioned pieces independently, and published them with little oversight.

“There has never been a section editor search where a diverse, LA-based, and ambitious group of candidates got to interview for the positions. As a result, rather than a well-paid group of writers and editors you have what is closer to a pay-to-play editorial composition,” says one former editor. “They’re all Tom’s people.” Many of the section editors, claims one former editor, were donors whose contributions to the annual fundraiser were assiduously tracked.

Their website currently lists 20 section editors. (In an interview with LA Weekly, Tom bragged they had 150 listed contributing editors on board when they launched. Today they list 270. The New York Review of Books, allegedly LARB’s peer, lists 21 editors in total.)

When Ukrainian-American writer and translator Boris Dralyuk took over as editor-in-chief in 2016, this system stayed the same. “There were two China editors. Two politics editors. Nobody really understood what they covered or why we needed them,” one former intern tells me. “There needed to be some clearing of the decks to make room for new ideas, new people, new energy. But that was really difficult to make happen.”

Boris left his position as EIC in 2022, but continued to weigh in on editorial decisions in an emeritus role. Chloe Watlington, the founding editor of Commune Magazine, was hired as managing editor and filled in for Boris while they searched for a new EIC.

“Prior to Chloe’s tenure, LARB was really a blog,” says one former editor. “Chloe has a very deep set of relationships with writers and editors, and a background literally making physical magazines. You could lock Chloe in a room for a month and she could commission pieces, edit them, write stuff herself, sell ads, deal with the printers, and get it distributed. LARB was beginning to feel like a real publication with rigor and editorial standards.”

And that’s when Michelle Chihara came in. The new EIC was a Whittier College professor who was taking a sabbatical to run the organization. It was immediately clear to some former employees that Michelle was treating it like a sabbatical. “An employee who had been on leave came back after several months and remarked [after being back for a few weeks] that she had yet to hear Michelle type,” recalls one editor. But what really blew up Michelle’s employment at the mag, former staffers say, was her response to October 7, after she put an effective gag order on commissioning any pieces acknowledging the genocide in Gaza.

“Michelle told us variously that she was facing pressure from the board not to say anything anti-Israel, and also that she had, in her words, ‘Jewish people in her life whose feelings would be hurt,’” says another former editor. “It was a workplace issue and treated as such. People were saying, ‘This is sort of unconscionable. Like, what are we doing?”

“It’s important to note that in the last year of Boris’s tenure as editor-in-chief, we probably published forty things about the war in Ukraine,” that editor told me. “But Michelle told us we couldn’t even discuss Gaza in editorial meetings.”

As the bombardment on Gaza intensified, so did pressure to acknowledge the genocide within LARB. Eventually, under the pressure of the Board of Directors (headed by Albert Litewka) and Tom Lutz, Boris was called back in to work with Michelle, Irene, and senior editor Rob Latham, creating a proxy editorial board that was tasked with deciding content on Palestine.

“Michelle said we would publish prose work from academics on what she called ‘the Israeli left,’ and we should publish poetry and artwork from Palestinians to, in her words, ‘humanize them,’” a former employee told me, “Someone in a meeting said, ‘I don’t need to read a poem to know someone in Gaza is a person.’”

One of the first things Tom and Rob proposed was a first-person essay by a writer from Santa Barbara named Ben Bastomski who volunteered for the IDF. He also models part-time. “It was one of the most bloodthirsty things I’ve ever read,” says one former editor. “And it was also written like YA.”

Discussion of the essay resulted in a barking match between Chloe, Tom, and Rob. “Chloe said, ‘This fucking idiotic IDF sniper himbo is not going to be the sole thing we edit or produce on the ongoing genocide in Gaza,’” remembers one former employee. “And Rob said, ‘I have to get off this call right now. I cannot tolerate you talking about this survivor in such a derogatory term as himbo.’”

The piece never made it past fact-checking. Regardless, leadership decided to move forward with a plan to publish five poems by Palestinian writers—Michelle, the former employees say, wanted these poems to be preceded by an editor’s note that would soften what she claimed would otherwise be an anti-Israeli sentiment. When she refused to take edits from staffers, the editors at the time insisted that the statement could only run if all of the poets agreed to it.

“She told each of the five poets individually that the other four had agreed to the editor’s note. She lied to them,” says one former editor. This was communicated to LARB editors via Signal and then relayed to Irene, the executive director. One year into her tenure as EIC, Michelle was allegedly fired over the incident—she says that she was stepping down to pursue other writing projects.

Prior to being brought in as Michelle’s replacement, Medaya Ocher’s resume was a series of one- to two-year stints at various literary and media institutions. Medaya, the former employees say, continued the tradition of EIC absenteeism established by Michelle. “There was a period where Medaya had not edited one full piece for two print issues, and over four or five months she had put out three or four pieces online total. She was completely absentee and inaccessible,” says one former editor.

“She would simply not proof the issues,” says another. “Like, the best issue we put out last year has the wrong season on the spine. It came out in July and says winter.”

Medaya, they said, frequently fumbled the ball when it came to editorial planning or editing. “We knew the election was coming a year ago,” says one editor. “I put it on the agenda and wanted to be prepared. Medaya constantly glossed over it. Then the day after the election, she texted us at 11:30 PM saying, ‘We need to cover this.’”

There were also accounts of cruelty:

“During [Redacted]’s performance review, Medaya did an extended, approximately three-minute impersonation of [another editor] as a baby. The premise was—you can’t make this shit up—‘This is [Redacted], who is at once a baby and a needy boyfriend.’ She was crooning, ‘Tell me I’m the best editor in LA, tell me I’m the best editor in North America.’ And then standing up saying, ‘[Redacted] wants a round of applause every time he walks into the office.’ She did it all in a baby voice. Irene just sat there, staring at the ceiling.”

“Irene’s job is to keep Albert, and thus, Tom happy,” another former editor told me. “The irony of that is that Irene Yoon is one of the most underpaid, overworked, depressed, and stressed-out worker at LARB. She loathes the laborious decisions Tom Lutz imposes on LARB, but she falls in line every time.”

Employees also told me about screaming matches in the office, threats, and denigrating remarks made by leadership, all of which happened in the absence of an HR representative. “In one instance, management opted to hire a private investigator to handle a clear HR situation,” one former staffer told me. “Despite how absurd this clearly was, no change was made, even upon countless staffer requests.”

Staffers who’ve left the organization say that these transgressions would have been tolerable had they been compensated fairly. However, they allege, LARB’s leadership forced wage staffers to work long hours without overtime pay—which is against the law in California.

“”They would repeatedly say, ‘Well, nobody takes this job thinking it’s 40 hours a week,’” says one former staffer. “I’d been working 70-hour weeks, but I was treated like a salaried employee. They would start meetings with me at 5:30 PM and we’d figure out scheduling until 8:30 PM. And then I’d fill out my timesheets with bullshit numbers like everybody else.”

I’ve looked at emails and text screenshots that corroborate these stories. When I emailed Irene for more context, this is what she said:

This isn’t true. Non-exempt employees are expected to work 40 hours a week. When that work involves events, we work with them to adjust their hours according to their requested schedule. Where overtime is due, we pay it. We take our obligations to our employees and the law very seriously.

I showed a former employee this statement and they replied: “If Irene says LARB’s policy is to pay workers for overtime, I’m owed 20 grand.”

“We’re hearing that we’ve raised the second most in history in our annual fund drive, and there’s no indication of where that money is going. It’s not going to staff salaries, and it’s not going to writers’ rates.”

It has been 15 years since Tom Lutz promised that the Los Angeles Review of Books would “become the best-paying book review outlet around”. But as of 2026, LARB was paying writers $100 per piece for digital and $150 for print—for pieces that often ran thousands of words long and required many days of research and reporting. (I know this firsthand because I almost wrote for LARB once or twice but was unmotivated by the fee.) Salaried staff were making $30K to $60K and were not offered healthcare until 2025. They now claim to offer healthcare. That healthcare is a $200 monthly stipend employees can use on related expenses.

Many of their interns were unpaid. In fact, the org offers a “summer publishing workshop” that functions like an internship, says one former intern—except the interns had to pay tuition.

Former employees say they were embarrassed to advertise the program. “What am I going to tell these kids?” says the former intern. “That maybe, if you pay for this internship with LARB, they’ll hire you and pay you literally $2 an hour?” And the writers weren’t biting for $100. “The working writers—the people actually trying to make writing and publishing their livelihood—they wouldn’t touch LARB.”

In a leaked email, one editor implored leadership to offer better rates: “It’s probably time to think about it another way: if we can’t afford to spend $400-$500 a day, we can’t afford to run two pieces a day.”

Soon after, staffers were pulled into a conference room and presented with a packet of information explaining why they couldn’t afford to pay writers more money. Medaya offered one solution: pay some writers $50 and others $150, which the staff rejected.

“We’re hearing that we’ve raised the second most in history in our annual fund drive, and there’s no indication of where that money is going,” another former editor tells me. “It’s not going to staff salaries, and it’s not going to writers’ rates.”

Los Angeles has few, if any, literary institutions with any name recognition. The need for an serious writing outlet is pressing in a city decimated by malicious investors and billionaires. But it remains dubious that a magazine run by a board of directors that seem divorced from the realities of writers and the workers in the trenches of magazine editing can be that outlet.

All of the editors I spoke to believe that LARB could be a magazine worthy of the name, but not without significant changes in the way that staff are treated. I think so too. It’s why I am interested in this story. There is a real hunger for cultural programming in Los Angeles. Literary readings can pack a room. There are more bookstores open than ever. (I should know—I wrote this story more than a decade ago.)

Writers in the city need a literary home. It’s unclear if LARB is the right one for them.

The LA Charter Reform Commission is recommending lowering the voting age in municipal elections to 16.

Ikea is moving into the old Helms Bakery space. You can blame Walter Marks III for this! He inherited the family real estate firm that owns Helms from his father, who. “looked for ways to use real estate to benefit the community, which included providing affordable space for nonprofits and businesses such as the Jazz Bakery.” I don’t think Marks Senior would have liked this!!!

BTW, the Canyon Country Store has changed ownership. One of the new owners wrote this in the comments: “Our intention is not to take away from what makes this location special, but to preserve it and make it even better while respecting its history and character. There are no plans on blue prints or structural changes.”

This essay about sugaring in Los Angeles by angela vang is just so beautiful. She writes with such humanity about her clients.

I enjoyed this interview with Sam Sweet, the author of All-Night Menu, a series of five booklets about different addresses in Los Angeles. I haven’t read them yet, but will now. He writes: “It’s only possible to appreciate the character of Los Angeles if you accept all of it without resorting to one lens, theme, location, or ideology.”

If you’re interested in seeing Lily Lady, the writer referenced at the top of this newsletter, she’ll be reading for Casual Encounterz next week. February 25 at Taix!