About Disruption Books

Kris Pauls helps leaders turn ideas into books that engage readers and change conversations.

As publisher of Disruption Books, she shepherds authors through the evolving landscape of today’s publishing industry. She has worked on titles ranging from business and politics to cookbooks, memoirs, and children’s literature, including several New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. ‍ 

Before leading Disruption Books, Kris served as managing editor of Greenleaf Book Group and director of design and production for Dana Press, which is the books and journals division of the Dana Foundation helmed by the late William Safire.


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Kris graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s degree in journalism. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Before she began a career in book publishing, Alli Shapiro’s favorite job was working as a marketing intern — for a commune. 

She no longer makes her own tofu, but hasn’t lost the drive to tell fresh stories from compelling perspectives. That goal guides her role as editorial and production director, where she helps authors navigate the writing process and works with partners at all stages of production, from cover design to printing.



Before joining Disruption Books, Alli was the online editor at a 100-year-old newspaper, where she led the transition of the family-owned property from print to digital. She joined Disruption Books in 2019 as the publisher’s inaugural intern. 

A military brat, Alli now lives in Brooklyn. You’ll find her at the theater, in the yoga studio, or on the subway as she works toward her goal of visiting every bookstore in NYC.

Christina Pulles has been helping authors tell their stories for more than 14 years. She started her publishing career in sales, where her proudest moment was handselling a specialty store 150 copies of a nature guide on mushrooms. She found her true calling in editorial, where she’s worked on everything from novelty board books to prescriptive nonfiction, with a lot of picture books and middle grade novels in between. 

Before working with Disruption Books, Christina was an editor at Simon & Schuster, American Reading Company, and Union Square & Company, the publishing division of Barnes & Noble.

Christina lives in Chicago with her family. When she’s not making books, she enjoys reading them, as well as baking, running, and going on neighborhood walks with her two-year-old.

In her twenty years in the book industry, Janet Potter has held a variety of roles — from bookseller, author events coordinator, book reviewer, and newsletter author, to marketing consultant. She’s handsold copies of Proust on the island of Santorini, judged Harry Potter costume contests, let Pulitzer Prize winners hide in her bookstore office, and started a comment war with a takedown of Stieg Larsson. 

As marketing director of Disruption Books, Janet helps authors effectively position their titles in the market in order to reach their unique audiences.

Before joining Disruption Books, Janet worked as a marketing manager at Independent Publishers Group, where she collaborated with hundreds of independent and international presses to navigate the U.S. book trade. 

Janet graduated cum laude from Wellesley College with a degree in Russian language and literature. She’s worked in independent bookstores in Boston, Dublin, Greece, and Chicago, and contributed arts and culture coverage to The Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, Men’s Journal, Huffington Post, The AV Club, and The Awl.

Janet lives in Chicago, where she enjoys biking, baking, and the NBA.

Pam started her career in the book business as a clerk at Rizzoli Bookstore in Chicago in the 1990s, when book availability was looked up on microfiche. 

She eventually moved to iconic feminist bookstore Women & Children First, where she hosted events for such authors as Marjane Satrapi, Isabel Allende, and Dorothy Roberts, and delighted in handselling small press books, including more than eighty copies of Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen.

She comes to Disruption Books after eighteen years managing the Trafalgar Square Publishing import program, handling five thousand books a year being distributed into the United States and Canada from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and India. The more than seventy publishers in the program ranged from such major houses as Penguin Random House UK, India, and Australia, to the small but mighty publishing arm of the British Library. This work garnered her a 2022 Publishers Weekly Star Watch nomination. 

She oversees operations for Disruption Books from Chicago, where she is usually at the movies; or home reading next to her cat.