AL: Dealmaker Updates – September

As a cost-cutting measure, Penguin Random House is reducing staff numbers through a combination of layoffs and a “voluntary separation offer.” Longtime editors including Ann Close (Knopf, pictured), Jonathan Segal (Knopf), and Wendy Wolf (Viking) opted to take the VSO, while Daniel Halpern (Knopf), Cal Morgan (Riverhead, pictured), and others were caught up in the layoffs.

Publisher Sean Desmond has left the company, to take an editorial position at another publisher that is still to be formally announced. Grand Central has not made any announcement about Twelve’s future yet.

Editorial director Antonia Markiet is retiring on September 15 after 50 years with the company. She began as an editorial assistant at Harper & Row in 1973.

VP, director of publishing for the Clarion group Mary Wilcox will leave the company on August 25, after over 20 years at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and then Harper Collins.

Associate editor and union chair Stephanie Guerdan was let go from the company. The Harper Collins union “filed a grievance against the publisher in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement and submitted an Unfair Labor Practice charge to the National Labor Relations Board.”

Anna Petkovich (pictured) has joined as agent. Previously she had been at Park & Fine Literary Media.

Valerie Frankel has joined as an agent.

Yezanira Venecia has joined as a junior literary agent. She was previously an editor at Melville House and Soho Press.

Carey Blankenship-Kramer joins as junior literary agent.

Hayley Steed will move over as a literary agent starting September 12, after seven years at Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency.