Lilly Gonzalez, executive director of the San Antonio Book Festival, has been named chief of staff of the nonprofit San Antonio Report.
Gonzalez will join the Report’s senior management team on Nov. 4.
She takes the helm of a business team previously led by Jenna Mallette, who accepted a position as chief operating officer at Rebuild Local News, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for nonpartisan public policies to support local news.
The chief of staff prepares budgets and forecasts and leads revenue-producing events, such as the annual CityFest, and human resources functions and board management.
Gonzalez will work closely with CEO and Publisher Angie Mock, Editor in Chief Leigh Munsil and Managing Editor Laura Garcia to support organizational planning and growth strategies at the Report.
“We are thrilled to welcome Lilly to the San Antonio Report Leadership team,” Mock said. “She is the right leader at the right time.”
A Rio Grande Valley native, Gonzalez earned a bachelor of science degree in journalism and a master’s degree in creative writing at Northwestern University.
“From early childhood, I fell in love with books; they became a lifeline out of the colonias,” Gonzalez said. “As I got older, I loved creative writing. I’ve always held a love for stories and storytelling.”
While pursuing a degree in journalism, Gonzalez was selected as the first student intern at Texas Monthly from the Medill School of Journalism. After graduating, she considered law school before going to work for the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, an immigration nonprofit serving the Texas-Mexico border.
“I was in the detention center delivering legal rights presentations to detained migrants facing deportation,” she said. “It was important, heartbreaking work and it led me back to storytelling. I didn’t want to represent our clients; I wanted to tell their stories.”
Gonzalez returned to Northwestern for graduate school, then worked in public affairs for two years at the John T. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. But the extreme cold drove her back to Texas.
“I picked San Antonio as my next hometown,” she said. “I loved that it was very much a big city but still small enough where one could have real impact. My heart belongs in nonprofits.”
Since 2019, Gonzalez has served as executive director of the San Antonio Book Festival, an annual free literary event, and held prior positions of increasing responsibility at the nonprofit since 2015.
Gonzalez said her journalism background helps her appreciate work from the Report, a local online news site founded in 2012.
“I always knew that if I was going to leave the Book Festival for another job in San Antonio, it would have to be pretty special,” she said. “I have deep admiration for the Report team and its reputation in our city.”