Joan Hilty

My 2019 kicked off with the publication of Showtime at the Apollo: The Epic Tale of Harlem's Legendary Theater,developed through Pageturner and published in January by Abrams Comic Arts; author Ted Fox was a contributor to the Oscar-shortlisted HBO documentary The Apollo. Pageturner also helped produce Mira Jacob's Good Talk, published in March and just announced as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2020, I'm excited for The Machine Never Blinks: A Graphic History of Spying and Surveillance from Fantagraphics, another Pageturner project. And of course, I hope to see as many book fans as possible, and to feature great graphic novel programming for them, at the Brooklyn Book Festival and the Miami Book Fair in the fall!

Patricia Mulcahy

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers (Abrams Press), a New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and trade paperback, made 2019 a banner year. On other fronts: I edited a twisty thriller for Grove Press, Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman, (June 2020), featuring a female former CIA agent turned “fixer.” Client Mateo Askaripour sold his highly engaging workplace satire Black Buck to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for publication in spring 2021.

Two Fellows from the Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writer Fellowship program saw their books successfully published in 2019: I really enjoyed working with Lauren Wilkinson on American Spy, and with Melissa Rivero on The Affair of the Falcons, about an undocumented Peruvian immigrant in New York City. And Fellow Nicola DeRobertis-Theye’s literary treasure hunt The Vietri Project went to Harper’s (spring 2021). It’s so rewarding to see these “emerging” writers launching their careers.

Jane Rosenman

I'm particularly pleased with my work on two upcoming nonfiction titles: Richard Grinker's Nobody’s Normal: A History of the Stigma of Mental Illness, which Norton will publish in January 2021, as well as Rachael Cerrotti's memoir—based on her podcast, which Huffington Post voted one of the Best Podcasts of 2019—called We Share the Same Sky: A Memoir of Memory and Migration, to be published by Blackstone in hardcover and audio in the fall of 2021. I also look forward to the upcoming publication of Honor Moore's Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, which Norton is publishing in March of this year. The author shared an earlier draft with me.

Judy Sternlight

I’d like to shine a light on two excellent novels I worked on that were published in 2019: Katrin Schumann’s Forgotten Hours (Lake Union Press), a Washington Post and Amazon Charts bestseller, and Mamta Chaudhry’s debut novel, Haunting Paris (Nan Talese/Doubleday). I taught several classes last year and loved working with writers in a group setting. At the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, I led a workshop series called “Active Storytelling” (Improvisation meets creative writing) and another workshop, “Reading as Performance,” to help writers strengthen their public speaking skills. I also taught a Breakaway session at the Slice Literary Conference on “Depth and Drive: Breathing Life into Your Characters.”

Liz Van Hoose

The year 2019 brought the publication of two cherished novels for which I provided early reads and commentary: Marcia Butler’s Pickle’s Progress (Central Avenue) and Alix Ohlin’s Dual Citizens (Knopf). And in 2020 I’m looking forward to the release of Fiona Davis’s The Lions of Fifth Avenue (Dutton) and Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints (Amistad), both of which were gripping reads even in their earliest forms and were a joy to respond to as an editor.

I’m delighted to be returning to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in July under the new leadership of Leah Stewart. This year, I’ll be offering a Publishing 101 seminar as well as a master class on crafting your narrative synopsis: “The Art of the Pitch: How to Free Your Story Description from Chronology.” The conference application deadline is March 15. I hope to see you on the Mountain this summer!

Leslie Wells

I was thrilled to work with Julie Andrews on her memoir Home Work, which was published by Hachette and was an instant New York Times bestseller. I also enjoyed giving commentary for an early draft of Adrienne Brodeur's Wild Game, a fascinating memoir that the New York Times Book Review called "Exquisite and harrowing." In addition, I edited novels in the historical fiction, thriller/mystery, and commercial women's fiction genres, as well as working with other memoir authors.