Announcing our Special Guest Author and Industry Experts for October 2024!
For our What is the Story You Have to Tell retreat, we will bring in acclaimed debut author ANITA GAIL JONES for several days. She will teach a master class:
How Characters Are Like an Iceberg:
10% in primary awareness; 90% below the surface (where story lives)
Anita will also participate in a discussion with her agent and editor about the journey of her book from idea to celebrated hardback and paperback in the world. Her agent and editor, bios below, will join us by Zoom.
ANITA GAIL JONES is a visual artist, storyteller, and writer born and raised in Albany, Georgia. She is a Hedgebrook Writing Residency alumna, and was a 2018-19 Affiliate Artist at The Headlands Center for the Arts. The Peach Seed, her debut novel, released on August 1, 2023 by Henry Holt & Company and in paperback on July 30, 2024,, was selected as a 2021 Top Ten Finalist in the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, for ELLE magazine’s 65 of the Best and Most Anticipated Books of 2023, ESSENCE magazine’s 15 New Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer, and by Georgia Center for the Book as one of ten 2024 Books All Georgians Should Read. The book was just long listed for the Crook’s Corner prize! Anita lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
STEVE ROSS launched the Steve Ross Agency as the next step in a long career in books. A literary agent and Director of the Book Division at Abrams Artists Agency for eight years, Steve also has more than two decades’ experience in the publishing industry, starting as an Editor and eventually becoming a Publisher, including running high-visibility and profitable divisions at major publishing companies. Steve was instrumental in publishing Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father and Audacity of Hope, and many other best-selling books of quality commercial non-fiction. Named one of seven “Influentials” in Books by New York Magazine and profiled on the front page of Crain’s as “a superb general nonfiction publisher,” Ross was Sr. VP and Publisher of Random House’s Crown Division for twelve years, where he conceived and launched several content-specific imprints that remain category leaders today. At Random House he worked with such authors as Arianna Huffington, Spike Lee, Suze Orman, Derek Jeter, Michael Jordan, Suzanne Somers, Erik Larson, The Onion, Jillian Michaels, Charles Schwab, and Max Brooks. See more on his web site.
RETHA POWERS, VICE PRESIDENT, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, HENRY HOLT & CO., acquires fiction and nonfiction. She is passionate about books by authors—especially people of color and LGBTQIA—who write inventively about the intersections of race, identity, gender, history, and current events. She is particularly interested in working with writers who challenge the status quo, build community, and create compulsively readable works that connect readers from varying backgrounds and experiences. Her acquisitions include Carolyn Ferrell’s acclaimed novel Dear Miss Metropolitan; Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s award-winning debut, My Monticello; José Olivarez’s Promises of Gold, which was longlisted for a National Book Award for Poetry; The Talk, an award-winning graphic memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell; Reese’s Book Club pick Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?; Michaela Cole’s Misfits, and Lessons For Survival by writer and climate activist Emily Raboteau.
Buy the Books Here & Support Sonoma County’s Local Bookstore, Copperfield’s!