Another Crown employee gets a new assignment, as Donna Passannante moves to Penguin Random House Audio on February 4 as senior vice president, marketing & publicity, reporting to president & publisher, Amanda D’Acierno. She was vice president & executive director, marketing at at the Crown Publishing Group. Newly reporting to Passannante are Katie Punia, vice president, publicity, and Heather Dalton, vice president, marketing.
At Chronicle Books, Madison Killen has been promoted to digital marketing manager, children’s; Jennifer Yim moves up to marketing and publicity coordinator, children’s; and Jenna Homen is now digital marketing manager, Adult.
At Random House Children’s, Kelly McGauley has been promoted to associate director of trade marketing; Sharon Burkle moves up to senior art director; Tara Grieco is now marketing manager; Jena DeBois becomes marketing associate; and Sarah Murphy becomes marketing coordinator.
In the UK, head of general non-fiction at Hodder Drummond Moir joins Ebury as deputy publisher on April 15. The publisher says it is creating two publishing “hubs,” which they call “centers of expertise.” Moir will run a “smart” hub (that means serious non-fiction, voice-led narrative and smart thinking/business titles), with editorial director Sara Cywinski promoted to serve as publisher of an entertainment hub when she returns from maternity leave later in the year. Ebury managing director Joel Rickett says, “The hubs enable us to harness shared skills and passions to drive each strand of publishing forward.”
Moir’s editorial team with include Jamie Joseph, Robyn Drury, Clare Bullock, and Lucy Oates, newly promoted to commissioning editor. Cywinski’s includes Lorna Russell, Emma Smith, Anna Mrowiec and Michelle Warner.
Crime writer Meg Gardiner has been named 2019 president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Author and renowned longtime book editor Diana Athill, “whose clear eye on life and literature inspired authors and readers alike,” has died at age 101. As an editor she worked with authors including Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul, and as an author “turning her flinty gaze on love, work and approaching death” she wrote memoirs including Instead of a Letter, Stet and the Costa biography prize-winning Somewhere Towards the End.
Awards
PEN America announced the shortlists for their literary awards, across 11 categories. Winners will be named February 26. Nominees for their $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Award are:
Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Carrying: Poems, Ada Limón
Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Educated, Tara Westover
Grants
Poets & Writers has been awarded $150,000 by the The Hearst Foundations to pilot an expansion of their core programs “to better serve writers coast to coast, especially writers of color and other historically marginalized groups,” in Detroit, New Orleans, and Houston.
The University of Washington Press has received a four-year, $1.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, building on a 2016 grant, “to support the continued development and expansion of the pipeline program designed to diversify academic publishing by offering apprenticeships in acquisitions departments.” The grant supports three annual cycles of editorial fellows at the University of Washington Press, the MIT Press, Cornell University Press, the Ohio State University Press, University of Chicago Press, and Northwestern University Press.