BTW News Briefs

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BookExpo Event Director Pens Post-Show Letter to Booksellers

In a June 7 letter to booksellers, Brien McDonald, the event director for BookExpo and BookCon, stated that Reed took a number of steps to improve networking and information-sharing opportunities for booksellers at this year’s BookExpo trade show, which took place from May 31 to June 2 in New York City.

The 2017 BookExpo show garnered 7,425 attendees comprised primarily of booksellers, librarians, retailers and media, McDonald wrote, with attendance at education sessions and author talks exceptionally high; BookCon on June 3 and 4 drew 20,000 fans.

“BookExpo is meant to create meaningful interactions in a focused professional environment while BookCon is built to directly connect fans with the authors and brands they love,” McDonald wrote. “They are both designed to energize and empower our industry and indie booksellers are core to this.”

McDonald wrote that Reed is committed to making sure that one event will not grow at the expense of the other.

“We are proud of the work we are doing with BookCon as it provides value to our exhibitors in a rapidly changing market, but these changes will not come at the expense of BookExpo’s B2B environment,” he wrote. “Serving indie booksellers is more important and crucial than ever as you represent the true pulse of the market through your daily interactions with your customers and communities.”

Children’s Book Council Introduces Reading Beyond Book List

The Children’s Book Council (CBC) has announced its new Reading Beyond book list, compiled to provide guidance to parents, caregivers, teachers, librarians, and booksellers interested in discovering books for children who read at an advanced level.

The list contains 75 challenging, but still age-appropriate, books chosen by the ALA-CBC (American Library Association & Children’s Book Council) Joint Committee, with 25 titles listed for each of three age categories: kindergarten and first graders reading at a third-grade level, second and third graders reading at a fifth-grade level, and fourth and fifth graders reading at a seventh-grade level. The books were chosen from more than 600 titles submitted for evaluation by the ALA member librarians of the committee and evaluated on their content, quality, and variety of genre and format.

The full 2017–2018 list is available as a downloadable handout with annotations by the nominating librarians and as a title and author listing by age category.

Ingram Announces Promotions and New Staff

Ingram Content Group has announced a number of associate promotions and new associates who have joined the company.

Kris Wiese has joined Ingram Content Group as senior manager of public relations and communications. She has over 11 years of experience in communications, public relations, and creative content writing.

Marcelo Suarez Melgarejo has been named key account sales manager for Ingram’s Lightning Source LLC office in Milton Keynes, U.K., while Derek Tolley has joined Ingram Library Services LLC as a senior sales representative covering the Mid-Atlantic Region, where he will focus on helping public libraries and K–12 schools.

Marc Visnick is a new business development manager for Ingram Book Group LLC, where he was previously a senior key account sales manager. Chris Thompson has been promoted to key account sales manager at Ingram Book Group; he previously served as a content manager at Ingram.

In addition, Beth Reinker has been named manager of collection development, adult materials, for Ingram Library Services. Prior to that, Reinker served as a collection development librarian.

Signature Launches “Immigrants Write” Series

Signature, a literary website run by Penguin Random House, has launched “Immigrants Write,” which shares books written by citizens of a country or by others who are intimately acquainted with countries in parts of the world that are unfamiliar to people living in the West.

As the series grows, the site will update its lists of books. Current book lists include “This Side of Syria,” a list of the best books to understand the Syrian experience; “Persian Perspective,” the best books to understand Iran; and “Understanding Sudan,” the best books to understand Sudanese history from yesterday to today.

Tracy K. Smith Named U.S. Poet Laureate

Tracy K. Smith has been named the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the New York Times reported.

Smith, who succeeds Juan Felipe Herrera as laureate, has published three poetry collections: The Body’s Question, Duende, and Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry; her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a 2015 National Book Award finalist in nonfiction. Graywolf will publish Smith’s newest collection, Wade in the Water, in April 2018.

The position of Poet Laureate provides the winner with an office in the Library of Congress, a travel budget, and a stipend. Smith will begin her year-long term this September with a reading at the Library of Congress. According to the Times, Smith said she “planned to use the position to be a literary evangelist of sorts, by visiting small towns and rural areas to hold poetry events.”

Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announced

The winners of Canada’s 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize are Alice Oswald for Falling Awake, in the international category, and Jordan Abel for Injun, in the Canadian category.

The Griffin Poetry Prize, which was founded in 2000 to serve and encourage excellence in poetry, honors “first edition books of poetry written in, or translated into, English and submitted from anywhere in the world.”

The winners were announced at the Griffin Poetry Prize awards ceremony on June 7 in Toronto. Each winner received $65,000 Canadian, equal to about U.S. $48,260. At the ceremony, poet Frank Bidart was announced as the recipient of this year’s Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award.

The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology: A Selection of the 2017 Shortlist, edited by Sue Goyette and published by House of Anansi Press, features the work of the poets shortlisted for the awards.

2017 Baileys Women’s Prize Winner Named

Naomi Alderman has won the U.K.’s £30,000 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her feminist science fiction novel The Power (Viking). She received the prize on Wednesday, June 7 at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The Power, Alderman’s fourth novel, is set in a world in which women gain the power to electrocute at will. The novel, an excerpt of which is available here, will be published in the U.S. in October by Little, Brown.

Going forward, Baileys will no longer be the headline sponsor of the prize; sponsorship of the Women’s Prize for Fiction for 2018 and beyond has yet to be confirmed.

Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced

The winners of the 29th annual Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the “Lammys,” were announced at a ceremony in New York City on Monday, June 12.

The awards “celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer writing for books published in 2016.” Among the winners in the awards’ 24 categories were Jacqueline Woodson and Jeanette Winterson, who were honored for their lifetime achievements.

Other winners of the night included David France for How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS (Knopf) in LGBT nonfiction, and activist Cleve Jones for When We Rise: My Life in the Movement (Hachette Books) in gay memoir/biography.

See all of this year’s winners on the Lambda Literary website.