Jessica Regel has left Foundry Literary + Media to start her own agency, Helm Literary.
Sasha White has been promoted to assistant agent at Tobias Literary Agency, seeking adult fiction, YA, political/historical non-fiction, memoirs, and world literature in translation.
At the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, Kate Weiss has been promoted to programs manager. They will fill her previous role by hiring a new communication coordinator.
Longtime Today Show producer Jackie Levin is leaving NBC News, Page Six reports, taking a buyout after 26 years at the network.
Obituaries
Pete Hamill, 85, journalist, columnist, and author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several books of nonfiction, died this morning. He had been working on a reminiscence about Brooklyn with the working title of BACK TO THE OLD COUNTRY.
John Adams, 64, a sales rep with Penguin Random House for 34 years, died Monday of a heart attack. President of US sales Jaci Updike writes, “There is so much that was impressive about John: he was a brilliant and dedicated reader, especially of our history books, even when there was no chance his accounts would carry them. At sales conference, when a publisher presented an 800+ page book on an obscure historical subject, it was not unusual to see John lean into the microphone with brilliant words of appreciation and support, positioning the book for the rest of us.”
Fiction writer Shirley Ann Grau, 91, who won the Pulitzer for her novel The Keepers of the House, died on August 3. The Washington Post remembers her as a “Louisiana writer whose atmospheric, richly detailed works explored issues of race, gender and power.”
Distribution
Penguin Random House India and Southeast Asia and Independent Publishers Group have announced a join distribution deal: PRHI will distributeIPG in India, and IPG’s Trafalgar Square Publishing will distribute PRHI in the US, Canada, the UK and EU.
Red Wheel/Weiser announces will distribute Lantern Publishing & Media starting September 1.