Mensah Demary has been promoted to editor-in-chief for Soft Skull.
Ada Zhang will join Running Press as an associate editor on March 8. Zhang was previously at Sterling Children’s.
David Nenke has been appointed president of digital student solutions at Barnes & Noble Education. Previously, he was general manager of Amazon Explore.
Molly Waxman has been promoted to executive director of marketing, fiction at Sourcebooks.
Stephen Bedford has been promoted to senior marketing director for the Simon & Schuster imprint.
At Chronicle Books, Eva Zimmerman has been promoted to senior publicist, children’s; Eden Sugay to sales & marketing manager; and Hannah Poor to sales & marketing coordinator.
Maggie Thompson has joined Maria B. Campbell Associates as senior scout. She was previously rights manager at Allen & Unwin in Australia.
Audio
Audiobook producer RBmedia announced an exclusive deal between its Christian Audio brand and three Christian publishers: InterVarsity Press, P&R, and 1517 Media. Additionally, Mark Warner has joined Christian Audio as the publisher and leader of the Christianaudio.com digital direct business. He was previously with HarperCollins Christian Publishing.
Picks
GMA Book Club chose Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Klara and the Sun as its March read.
Barnes & Noble‘s monthly National Book Club selection is Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End.
Reese’s Book Club chose Patricia Engel‘s Infinite Country as its March read.
Distribution
Leaders Press will be sold and distributed by Simon & Schuster worldwide starting April 1.
Awards
The L.A. Times announced finalists for its Books Prizes, with winners to be announced on April 16. Novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko will receive the 2020 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. BINC will receive the 2020 Innovator’s Award. Among the nominees are:
Fiction
What Happens at Night, by Peter Cameron,
At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop (translator Anna Moschovakis)
The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi,
The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans
Likes, by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum,
First Fiction
Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart
These Ghosts Are Family, by Maisy Card
Little Gods, by Meng Jin
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, by Deesha Philyaw
A House is a Body, by Shruti Swamy
Current Interest
A Knock at Midnight, by Brittany K. Barnett
The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross
Separated, by Jacob Soboroff
Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
Biography
The Dead Are Arising, by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Red Comet, by Heather Clark
Warhol, by Blake Gopnik
Eleanor, by David Michaelis
Mad at the World, by William Souder