People Round-Up, Mid-March 2017

PEOPLE

At Simon & Schuster, Valerie Steiker joins Scribner as Executive Editor on April 17. She had been the longtime culture editor at Vogue.

At Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, Lauren Hoffman will join on March 27 as VP, Marketing and Publicity. She was most recently VP, Brand Marketing, at MK Creative/Media/Marketing. Nicole Russo returns as Senior Director of Publicity, having most recently worked as Director, Children’s Publicity and Marketing, at Abrams.

As part of a restructuring at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Laurie Brown, SVP, Associate Trade Group Publisher and Business Development, has left the company and may be reached at brown.laurie8@gmail.com.

Melanie Chang is joining Abrams as VP, Children’s Marketing and Publicity. She was previously VP, Integrated Marketing at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. Liz Fithian joins as Director, Franchise Marketing. She was previously Director of Marketing at Macmillan Children’s.

Rebecca Marsh joins Viking/Penguin Books as Publicity Manager, having been Senior Publicist at the Crown Publishing Group for Crown Archetype, Harmony, and Three Rivers Press. Parisa Ebrahimi joins Crown and Hogarth as Editor, moving over from Chatto & Windus in London.

John Donovan has joined VitalSource as Managing Director of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. He was previously Director of Global Sales and Business Development for Epigeum, an online courseware provider.

Meredith Barnes has joined the general fiction publicity department at Harlequin as Publicity Manager; she previously led publicity, library presence, and digital marketing strategy and campaigns at Soho Press.

At agencies…Sarah Bowlin and Ariel Foxman have both joined Aevitas Creative Management as Affiliate Agent. Bowlin was previously Senior Editor at Holt and will work from her home in Los Angeles; Foxman was previously Editorial Director at InStyle and StyleWatch. Sam Morgan has joined Foundry Literary + Media as Literary Agent, having previously been Literary Agent at Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. Alanna Feldman has left Mary Anne Thompson Associates in order to start Alanna Feldman Scouting. She has been appointed US Scout for the Orion Publishing Group, her first client.

At Amazon’s Little A imprint, Laura Van der Veer has joined as Editor. She was previously Associate Editor at Spiegel & Grau.

Paul Muldoon is stepping down as Poetry Editor of the New Yorker after a decade, and Kevin Young will take his place. Young is currently Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

At Northwestern University Press, Jill Petty is joining as Acquisitions Editor. She was previously Senior Editor at Beacon Press.

Marie-Claire Antoine has joined Lynne Rienner Publishers as Senior Acquisitions Editor for political science and international relations. She was previously Senior Acquisitions Editor at Rowman & Littlefield.

Hannah Wood has left Harper and is relocating to San Francisco to work as a freelance editor.

PROMOTIONS

At Random House Children’s, Mary McCue is now Associate Director of Publicity. At Portfolio/Sentinel, Niki Papadopoulos has been promoted to Editorial Director; Stephanie Frerich, to Executive Editor; and Leah Trouwborst, to Associate Editor. Matt Klise is now Assistant Editor at Penguin Books.

Natasha Simons is now Editor at Gallery Books and Threshold Editions.

At Basic Books, Leah Stecher has been promoted to Editor.

At Abrams, Steve Tager, currently Senior VP, Chief Marketing Officer, is moving from overseeing children’s marketing and publicity to overseeing marketing and publicity for adult lines, including Abrams Plus Noterie and Abrams Press.

At Chronicle Books, Phuong Mai has been promoted to Metadata Specialist and Freesia Blizard has been promoted to Production Developer. In addition, AiLing Tjan is now Accounting Supervisor, Barrett Hooper is now Senior Financial Analyst, and Christina Mott becomes Distribution Client Account Manager.

DULY NOTED

Bonnier Publishing is expanding Igloo Books to the US, with Jeremy Nurnberg, currently Director of Sales, North America, heading the line.

Diamond Comic Distributors will handle exclusive worldwide distribution rights to comic book specialty stores for YA publisher Rabbit Publishers, and will handle distribution to bookstores, libraries, chains, and specialty outlets through Diamond Book Distributors. Effective June 5, Diamond Comic Distributors will also handle exclusive sales and distribution for Yen Press outside of North America in traditional and non-traditional book channels.

Abrams has released more information about Abrams Press, a nonfiction imprint launching in May under Jamison Stoltz. The inaugural release will be Michael Ruhlman’s Grocery: The Buying of Selling of Food in America, due out May 16. Fall 2017 will see the release of Paul Sahre’s illustrated memoir Two-Dimensional Man; Breaking Bad 101 by TV critic Alan Sepinwall; and knitting essay anthology A Stash of One’s Own, edited by Clara Parkes. Spring 2018 will see, among other recent acquisitions, a collection of essays by refugee writers edited by Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and a “collective memoir, “ A Grand Success!, edited by Peter Lord, Davis Sproxton, and Nick Park.

IN MEMORIAM

George Braziller, independent publisher and founder of the publishing house George Braziller Inc., died March 16 at 101. Throughout his career, he championed literary and artistic books and foreign authors.

The New York Review of Books reports that founding editor Robert B. Silvers died yesterday morning after a short illness. He was 87.