Jenna Johnson will join Farrar, Straus as executive editor on June 6, after 14 years at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Also, Jeremy Davies moves to FSG as editor on May 9, from Dalkey Archive Press, where he began in 2005.
In other moves, Emi Ikkanda will join Spiegel & Grau as a senior editor on May 16, coming over after 8 years at Holt.
Jessica Sit joins Paper Latern Lit as editor. She was previously at Atheneum.
Chris Smith has been promoted to publicist for Viking and Penguin Books.
Saraciea Fennell will join Little, Brown Children’s as publicist. She was most recently a publicist at Scholastic.
NY Magazine has an “exit interview” with Jessa Crispin about the closing of Bookslut. (Her publisher, Melville House, is holding a “wake” for the site this Friday.) “Running it takes a lot of time, and it makes no money so I’ve been pouring money into it for 14 years. We always were trying to figure out ways to keep it going. I had a meeting with my managing editor and we went through all these ideas and nothing seemed viable and we said, ‘Oh, we should just close it, shouldn’t we?” Crispin adds, “The only reason why Bookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it. It used to be you could get an advertiser for a month; now it’s all directly linked to how many pageviews you get.”
More broadly, she notes: “We didn’t make money, we weren’t a major influence, and we didn’t launch great writers into the system. And yet it gave me my entire life. It introduced me to everyone who’s important to me at this point.”