Writing for a Wider Audience
Panel, Q&A, and Reception with Refreshments
Panel, Q&A, and Reception with Refreshments
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Bush Room 10-105 | 5:30-7:30pm
Watch the Video: Writing for a Wider Audience
Six distinguished publishing professionals discuss ways for academics to share your knowledge with a wider audience.
The panelists include leading literary agents, non-fiction trade book editors, a magazine editor, and an op-ed editor. The event was sponsored by the Office of the Dean, MIT SHASS, and Kneerim & Williams, a literary agency with offices in Boston and New York.
Meet the Panelists
Dawn Davis is the VP and Publisher of 37 INK, an imprint within the Atria Publishing Group at Simon & Schuster. Since launching 37 INK, she has published several New York Times bestsellers, including The Butler: A Witness to History by Wil Haygood, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae, and Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea by Jang Jin- Sung. Previously, Davis directed the Amistad imprint at HarperCollins, where she published well-known, highly acclaimed bestselling authors, including Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle, and the IMPAC Awards for Fiction; Attica Locke, author of Black Water Rising, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Edgar Award; and Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of the New York Times bestselling novel Wench.
Matt Weiland is a Vice President and Senior Editor at W. W. Norton & Company. He has worked at Ecco Books, Granta Books, and Columbia University Press, as well as on The Paris Review, Granta, and The Baffler. He also served as project director for the documentary radio unit American RadioWorks. Weiland is the co-editor, with Sean Wilsey, of the bestselling State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (2008) and, with Thomas Frank, of the bestselling Commodify Your Dissent (1997). His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, Bookforum, Slate, and elsewhere. Originally from Minneapolis, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Dante Ramos is the editor of The Boston Globe's Ideas section. He also writes a column. He previously was deputy editorial page editor at the Globe and a reporter and opinion page staffer at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He has contributed to The Economist, The New York Times, The New Republic, Architecture Boston, and other publications. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in editorial writing in 2014.
Gareth Cook is a Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine journalist and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He has served as the editor of the bestselling series The Best American Infographics, as The Boston Globe's science reporter, and his writing has appeared in NewYorker.com, Wired, Scientific American, The Washington Monthly, and The Boston Globe Ideas section. He is also the editor of Scientific American’s Mind Matters psychology blog. Gareth graduated from Brown University with degrees in International Relations and Mathematical Physics. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his wife, Amanda, and their two boys.
Jill Kneerim is a founder of the well-known literary agency Kneerim & Williams, and represents academics, journalists, and novelists, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft and George Washington prizes, the PEN Malamud Award, the PEN Hemingway Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her authors include scholars Stephen Greenblatt, Matthew Desmond, Caroline Elkins, Diana Eck, and former poet laureate Robert Pinsky; as well as journalists, biographers, memoirists, and academics who regularly write for op-ed pages around the nation. Jill is a former editor and book publisher who has overseen the creation of countless books and worked with hundreds of authors. She’s looking for books on ground breaking ideas in history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and other fields and has made a specialty of bringing good academic writers into the mainstream.
Lucy Cleland is a literary agent and the dramatic rights manager at Kneerim & Williams, where she has worked with new and established authors on projects ranging from groundbreaking “big idea” nonfiction to literary fiction and memoir. A Southern transplant to Boston, Lucy graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College, where she studied English and studio art. Previously she interned at Yale University Press and worked as a research assistant at the Emory Goizuetta Business School. She enjoys books that explore unconventional social and cultural history, the lives of creatives and rebels, and questions about identity and inheritance.
Watch the Video: Writing for a Wider Audience