Camille McDuffie is leaving her position as president of Goldberg McDuffie Communications to join the newly-created Columbia Global Reports as publisher, under director Nicholas Lemann. It’s a Columbia University-based publishing project “dedicated to the production of sustained, original reporting and analysis on under-reported global issues for audiences that extend beyond the academy,” and they will produce four to six short books a year, for publication beginning in fall 2015. Also joining the unit as editor is Jimmy So, who was a culture and books editor at The Daily Beast.
At William Morrow, Jessica Williams has been promoted to editor.
Heather Alexander has joined Pippin Properties as an agent. Previously she was an associate editor at Dial.
Kempton Mooney has joined the Nielsen Book Americas group as director, research and analytics. Mooney has worked for a number of publishers over the last 13 years – including Random House and Hachette Book Group.
The National Book Awards are providing one more chance to submit candidates. They said in an email: “It has come to our attention that this year’s changes in our entry schedule inadvertently led some publishers to miss our entry deadline. Therefore, we will reopen the National Book Awards online entry form on Wednesday, June 4, at 12:01am Eastern, and the form will remain open through Friday, June 6 at midnight, Pacific.
Asian American Writers’ Workshop is giving Alane Mason at Norton their first AAWW Editorial Achievement Award.
Macmillan Audio announced that Oprah Winfrey will narrate the audiobook edition of her forthcoming September 3 from Flatiron Books, What I Know For Sure.
Baker Literary Scouting has been appointed scout for DuMont Buchverlag in Germany and Albin Michel in France, for the adult fiction and non-fiction markets in the US and Canada.
For a little more background on the new Penguin Random House wordmark, Business Week spoke to Michael Beirut at design firm Pentagram: “Although Pentagram explored different ways to merge the penguin and house—including one of a penguin stepping out from behind a door—the hybrid logo fell flat with the stakeholders. ‘Instead of satisfying to both sides,’ Bierut says, ‘we found it to be insulting to both sides.'”