Jocelyn Kalmus joins the Free Press as a publicist. She was an assistant publicist at Harper Collins.
At Scholastic Media, Daisy Kline has been promoted to vp of marketing and brand management.
Westchester’s Journal News has a nice profile of editor Pam Dorman: “She never gets recognized in New Rochelle, but in the publishing world everybody knows” her.
Pop star Taylor Swift played the Scholastic auditorium, “where about 200 grade-schoolers and middle-schoolers, most of them girls, had received a break from class to see Swift talk about reading and writing. The children had been selected by their schools because of improvement in their reading scores.” Among her remarks: “A lot of people who gravitate toward music are really, really sort of drawn to poetry because the words all have a rhythm and it comes together just right,” she said. “I love poetry, because if you get it right, if you put the right rhymes at the right ends of the sentences, you can almost make words bounce off a page.”
At last night’s FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year awards, Raghuram G. Rajan‘s FAULT LINES: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy from Princeton University Press prevailed over more commercially prominent books from Michael Lewis, Andrew Ross Sorkin, David Kirkpatrick and others. (Ironically, it was the only one of the six books not included in the farewell tote bag, too.)
The recipients of the 2010 Whiting Awards, providing $50,000 each to 10 “writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career,” were named last night:
Fiction
Michael Dahlie (A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living)
Rattawut Lapcharoensap (Sightseeing)
Lydia Peelle (Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing)
Nonfiction
Elif Batuman (Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them)
Amy Leach
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (When Skateboards Will Be Free)
Poetry
Matt Donovan (Vellum)
Jane Springer (Dear Blackbird)
LB Thompson (Tendered Notes: Poems of Love and Money)
Plays
David Adjmi
In the UK, nominations are out for the new/revamped Galaxy National Book Awards. They cover eight categories (popular fiction; book of the year; new writer; children’s book; food & drink book; biography; international (e.g. non-UK) author; and UK author.
Nominees