Erin Simpson has been named director of the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau, reporting to Brian Belfiglio. Along with the appointment, the company is transitioning the speakers bureau into an in-house venture, effective April 1. Since it was founded in 2008, their speakers bureau had been operated by Greater Talent Network on behalf of the publisher. Simpson had been agent director at the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau before joining S&S.
Kelly Booth has joined Ten Speed Press as creative director. She was previously creative director at Weldon Owen. Emma Campion becomes deputy creative director. Erin Skeen has joined as studio manager, reporting to Booth. (She was at Insight Editions.)
At Orbit, Alex Lencicki has been promoted to vp, associate publisher; Priyanka Krishnan and Bradley Englert have each been promoted to senior editor; Laura Fitzgerald moves up to senior marketing manager; Paola Crespo becomes senior marketing and publicity associate.
Alexa Higbee has joined Holiday House as associate publicist. She was previously sales & marketing associate at David R. Godine.
Forthcoming
The second book in Phillip Pullman‘s Book of Dust series, The Secret Commonwealth, will be published on October 3, by Knopf Children’s and Penguin Random House UK. Set 20 years after the events of first book, La Belle Sauvage, the next installment again follows Lyra Silvertongue as she is “forced to navigate a complex and dangerous new world that takes her far beyond the edges of Oxford, across Europe, and into Asia.”
Picks
The PBS-NYT Book Club selected Naomi Alderman’s The Power as its March pick.
Awards
PEN America announced its Literary Awards winners at a ceremony on Tuesday evening. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Editor: Naomi Gibbs at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff at DeFiore and Company) won the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. The collection is excerpted and available to sample now in our Buzz Books 2018 Fall/Winter edition. Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin (Editor: Andy Ward at Random House; Agent: Esther Newberg at ICM) won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection; Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Editor: Dawn Davis at 37 Ink; Agent: Anna Stein at ICM) won the PEN Open Book Award for a book-length work of any genre by an author of color; and Against Memoir by Michelle Tea (Editor: Lauren Hook at Feminist Press; Agent: Lindsay Edgecombe at Levine Greenberg Rostan) won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. See the full list of winners here.
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