Best-Selling Authors to Speak at First Mississippi Banned Book Festival
Angie Thomas, Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon, and Rick Bragg are among the best-selling authors who will be speaking at the first-ever Mississippi Banned Book Festival. The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today is sponsoring the event, along with the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, the Millsaps Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Center, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Mississippi ACLU, and Lemuria Books. The Mississippi Banned Books Festival kicks off at 9 a.m. on March 25 at Millsaps College in Jackson.
Leigh Bardugo Signs Massive New Deal with Macmillan
Macmillan has just announced that bestselling author Leigh Bardugo has signed an eight-figure, multi-million-dollar deal “for a slate of new projects to be published across multiple divisions of the company, in a variety of formats, age categories, and genres.” The new deal with Bardugo, author of Shadow and Bone, includes work to be published with four imprints — Flatiron Books, Nightfire, Roaring Brook Press, and First Second Books.
No details about what Bardugo has planned have been announced, but the author said in a statement: “Macmillan took a chance on me over a decade ago and they’ve been my home ever since. When no one in YA was interested in epic fantasy, they welcomed Shadow and Bone. When everyone wanted books about kings and queens, they rolled the dice on my team of six outcasts trying to pull off an impossible heist. And when I wanted to go someplace far darker, they backed me in welcoming readers to Ninth House. Publishing is a tough business and it’s no small thing to be able to write the stories I’m most passionate about.”
Meet the 2023 Finalists for NYPL’s Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism
The New York Public Library has announced the five finalists for its 36th annual Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award recognizes nonfiction books written by journalists who are bringing attention to societal issues and/or significant current events. The nominees this year are: The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher; My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden; The Other Side of Prospect by Nicholas Dawidoff; The Treeline by Ben Rawlence; and Under the Skin by Lydia Villarosa.
Why More Men Should Read Romance
Less than 20 percent of romance readers are men, but here are the many reasons this number should be higher.