Simon & Schuster vp, director of children’s sales Mary Marotta will move over on May 5 to become deputy publisher for Aladdin, Little Simon, Simon Pulse and Simon Spotlight, reporting to division president Jon Anderson. Marotta fills the role vacated by Mara Anastas when she moved up to publisher of Aladdin and Simon Pulse. Anderson notes, “Her sales skills coupled with her business acumen are exactly what are needed to take Little Simon, Simon Spotlight, Aladdin and Simon Pulse to the next level in their growth and development.”
Jodi Rosoff has joined Grand Central as publicity & marketing director for the Forever and Forever Yours imprints. Previously she was associate director of marketing & publicity at Berkley/NAL.
Jillian Vandall has joined Random House Children’s Books as publicist. She was previously associate publicist at S&S Children’s. In addition, Ray Shappell has joined the KDD Art Group as designer for young adult titles, working with the Crown Children’s, Delacorte, Knopf Children’s, and Wendy Lamb imprints. Previously he was a designer at Harper Children’s.
Guernica has a lengthy interview with Fiona McCrae, who has run Graywolf Press for the past 20 years. The well-timed piece comes as a Graywolf author has won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for the second time in three years. “It doesn’t do any good to be talking, as an author or publisher, about the obstacles. There are better uses of energy, I think. Yes, we can all feel helpless and wary in this industry sometimes, but it’s better, as a publisher, to look at the ways in which e-books and Twitter and so on can help us reach new readers, rather than treating social media as an enemy to literature. At the event for emerging writers at A Public Space last night, we had a full house. How? By A Public Space and Graywolf posting about it on Facebook and Twitter.”
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has its own feature focused on Graywolf’s success. McCrae tells the paper, “We wanted to publish people who don’t sound like anybody else. And I think that helps people rise to the top, when they don’t sound like anyone else.”