Marisa Melendez is promoted to assistant production director, supporting Vintage.
Jeri Castro has been promoted to senior associate, production, supporting Berkley.
Daniel Brount has been promoted to senior designer.
Gary Fisketjon
In a profile of former Knopf editor and current Panamerica editor Gary Fisketjon, Air Mail investigates his firing from Knopf in 2019 for “a breach of company policy.” PRH, Fisketjon, and the employee who filed the complaint did not comment to the magazine, which “fill[ed] in the missing details” from reports from six other colleagues.
After a history of visible intoxication during the workday, “On a spring Friday in 2019, Fisketjon came back from lunch noticeably drunk. Instead of buttonholing one of his peers, he stopped by the cubicle of a young woman in the publicity department. I was told that she felt trapped.
“At some point, Fisketjon put his hands on her shoulders. This was something he had done many times before, to men and women alike. His older colleagues were emphatic that it was always a friendly gesture, and never a sexual one, but Fisketjon was woefully out of touch with evolving professional norms, and for this employee, the contact was decidedly unwanted.”
Fisketjon “is now sober,” the publication reports, and “is legally prohibited from talking about his firing.”
David Samuels, who hired Fisketjon to run Panamerica, says: “Some large percentage of the books that I’ve loved since I was 16 or 17 years old were edited or published by Gary Fisketjon. So when I thought about who I wanted as the sort of North Star of this enterprise, there was only one name that came to mind, and it came to mind immediately: What if I could get Gary Fisketjon? There was no second choice.”
