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BISG Seeks Nominations for Industry Champion and Innovation Awards 

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) is inviting anyone employed by a BISG member organization to nominate candidates for the organization’s annual Industry Champion and Innovation Awards through SurveyMonkey. Nominees need not be members of BISG.

The Industry Champion Award will be presented to “an individual whose efforts have gone beyond the requirements of his or her position to advance the publishing industry while embracing BISG’s mission, to facilitate innovation and shared solutions for the benefit of all companies and practitioners who create, produce, and distribute published content.”

The Industry Innovation Award is for “a company or individual who boldly reimagines what publishing is and can be.”  

All nominations are due by Wednesday, July 15. Recipients will be honored at BISG’s Annual Meeting of Members on September 18 in New York City. For more information on the contest, contact BISG’s Jeanette Zwart.

WNDB Scholarship Winners to Receive Free Membership in Children’s Literary Society

The Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) has partnered with We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) to provide free, one-year SCBWI memberships for the five college students selected to receive WNDB’s first publishing internship grants.

This summer’s WNDB internship program, which is also supported by the Children’s Book Council, was designed to open up the children’s book publishing industry to talented job-seekers from diverse backgrounds. Now, the partnership with SCBWI will serve to provide internship participants with further networking opportunities within the industry.

“We want to support this internship effort wholeheartedly,” said SCBWI President Lin Oliver. “Anything the SCBWI can do to enhance and promote diversity in our field, we are glad to do.”

The WNDB Internship Program, which is chaired by author Linda Sue Park, recently announced the five recipients of the inaugural grants: Julie Jarema, who will be interning at Simon & Schuster; Feather Flores (HarperCollins); Kandace Coston (Lee & Low); Esther Cajahuaringa (Hachette); and Yananisai Makuwa (Macmillan).

PEN Posts Summary of Emerging Writers Prize-Winning Work

A project summary is available on the PEN website for Dead Boys by Adriana E. Ramírez, the inaugural recipient of the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize, which is dedicated to a promising young writer of an unpublished work of nonfiction that addresses a global and/or multicultural issue. Ramírez’s win for her nonfiction manuscript was first announced at the PEN American Center’s Annual Literary Awards ceremony on June 8.

According to a June 29 statement from PEN, “Dead Boys takes an unflinching look at the bodies of those who have died too young: nine people hanged by a drug cartel on the U.S.-Mexico Border, the washed-up casualties of Colombian strife, a young boy unable to outrun a loan shark, and even a tragic death in the author’s own family. Through these personal stories, this manuscript examines how complex geopolitics can manifest in the individual stories of people from the three countries Ramírez calls her own: Mexico, Colombia, and the United States.”

Project summaries are also available for the prize finalists: Melissa Petro for Unbecoming, Liz Quinn for The Forgotten Midwives of Guatemala, and Krystal Sital for Incantations. Excerpts from the works will be posted on the PEN/American Center website within the coming weeks.