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People, Etc.

July 6, 2016
By Sarah Weinman

Deb Brody will join Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as editorial director for lifestyle & culinary on July 18. Previously she was executive editor at William Morrow.

Michael Strother has joined Harlequin Teen as editor. Previously he was an editor at Simon Pulse.

Jermey Matthews will join MIT Press as acquisitions editor, physical sciences, engineering and math. Previously he was books editor at Physics Today.

Patricia Kelly has been appointed general manager of Lonely Planet’s Oakland, CA location, in addition to her current role as director of sales, Americas.

Cliff Manko has joined Beacon Press as chief financial officer. He was svp finance for the Higher Education Group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and vp finance for Global Product Management at Cengage Learning. At Beacon, he is responsible for finance, inventory control, production services, and digital audio.

Penguin Random House UK digital publisher Dan Franklin is leaving the company on July 14 after his position was eliminated. A spokesperson for the company told the Bookseller: “Digital expertise is now part of the fabric of Penguin Random House with teams throughout the business experimenting with new formats and platforms. We have therefore taken the decision that a central digital publisher role is no longer needed and, as such, Dan will be leaving the business.”

New Imprints
Author and artist Christopher Myers will launch a new imprint, Make Me A World, with Random House Children’s Books in 2018, overseen by Knopf Young Readers publisher Jenny Brown. The imprint and name “reflects Myers’s vision: to publish a selection of books that open up new worlds, possibilities, and pathways for young readers of all ages”, and will launch with Child of the Universe by astronomer Ray Jayawardhana; the picture book Mama Mable’s All-Gal Big Band Jazz Extravaganza! by Annie Sieg; and the inspirational memoir Walk Toward the Rising Sun by Ger Duan.

Myers said in the announcement: “Every day in the newspapers we see how much stories matter, the stories we tell each other and ourselves, and for too long many stories have been neglected, many storytellers ignored. Each of these untold stories represents a world that has been erased. My father [Walter Dean Myers] built worlds for countless children in his stories. He wanted to make sure no child felt erased as he had, growing up poor and Black in Harlem in the 1940s, where brown, bright faces like his own were nowhere to be found in the pages of books. MAKE ME A WORLD will continue that work, recognizing storytellers from all walks of life that can build for contemporary children a sense that they too have the ability in their creative hands, in their hearts, to build their own worlds.”

Obituary
Matthew Evans, 74, former head of Faber and Faber (and husband of agent Caroline Michel) died on Wednesday following a long illness. He joined the publisher in 1964, and became chairman and and managing director in 1980. Current Faber chief executive Stephen Page commented, “He was one of the most singular and important publishing leaders of his generation. Passionate, energetic and articulate, his contribution to Faber is incalculable.”

Evans’s friend Melvyn Bragg call him “one of the most remarkable men of his generation” and told the Guardian, “His great gifts included bringing on authors like Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Golding, Paul Auster and many others, some of whom had been there in Matthew’s early days but all of whom were devoted to him and deeply respectful of his rigid integrity.”

Settlement
As expected, the legal settlement of the class action suit brought by authors against Harlequin which we reported on in April was approved by the court. Qualifying authors with contracts signed between 1990 and 2004, who were seeking additional payment for books for which Harlequin licensed ebook rights to its own subsidiaries, will share a pool of just over $3 million (with another $1.05 million going to attorneys and other costs). Complete information is posted at the settlement site.

Awards
Esme Weijun Wang‘s The Collected Schizophrenias has won Graywolf Press’s Nonfiction Prize — which includes publication of the manuscript and a $12,000 advance.

Filed Under: Authors, Awards, Bookstores, Free, New Imprints, Personnel

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