BTW News Briefs

Children’s Book Week Dates, Poster Illustrator Announced

The Children’s Book Council has announced that next year’s Children’s Book Week will take place from April 30 to May 6, 2018.

Children’s Book Week is presented by the Children’s Book Council and Every Child a Reader. Official event registration will begin on December 4, 2017, on the Every Child a Reader website.

The illustrator of this year’s official CBW poster will be Jillian Tamaki, an illustrator and comics artist who is the co-creator, with her cousin Mariko Tamaki, of Skim (Groundwood Books) and This One Summer (First Second).

Visit the Every Child a Reader website to learn more about Children’s Book Week.

Independent Bookstore Day Calling for Bookseller Submissions for Book Club Journal

The organizers behind Independent Bookstore Day (IBD) are calling on booksellers and authors to help create a Book Club Journal for the upcoming year’s event on April 28, 2018.

IBD program director Samantha Schoech is asking booksellers across the country for their most fun, insightful, readable lists of 10 titles to recommend to a book club. Each list should have a theme, and all genres are welcome. Creativity is encouraged.

Booksellers should e-mail their lists to Schoech with the subject line BOOK LIST by December 1, 2017, for consideration. Every list may not be used, and IBD reserves the right to edit or combine lists. Booksellers should include their name, bookstore and city, and favorite genre in their submission. 

BookCon Lineup Announced

ReedPOP has announced the initial lineup of authors set to take the BookCon stage in June 2018.

Authors promoting their books at BookCon will include Hollywood stars like actor Taye Diggs and Orange Is the New Black actress Diane Guerrero, as well as popular YA writers Angie Thomas, Jason Reynolds, Leigh Bardugo, Marissa Meyer, and Victoria Aveyard.

BookCon 2018 takes place June 2–3 at the Javits Center in New York City following BookExpo, and will feature panels, screenings, author Q&As, and autographing sessions. Tickets go on sale November 15.

ReedPOP will announce more guests as the event approaches.

Family of Missing Hong Kong Bookseller Unsure of His Whereabouts

The family of the co-owner of a Hong Kong publishing house who has been held in China for the past two years are still unsure of his whereabouts, despite the fact that Chinese authorities say they released him on October 17, according to an October 24 report in the New York Times.

The publisher, Gui Minhai, was a co-owner of Mighty Current Media and its bookshop in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong, which is a semiautonomous Chinese city; Mighty Current publishes and sells books critical of China’s leaders. Besides Gui, four other men associated with the publisher had previously been detained and were later released.

In a statement posted to Twitter on October 24, his daughter Angela Gui wrote that Swedish diplomats said China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told them that Gui, who is a Chinese-born Swedish citizen, would be released on October 17. However, Gui wrote, she and her family and Gui’s friends had not yet heard from him at that time. The Chinese Foreign Ministry also told the New York Times that he was released on October 17 but did not answer a question about his current whereabouts.

Reports emerged on Friday, October 27, that appear to confirm Gui’s partial release, according to the Guardian. Bei Ling, a friend of Gui, told the Hong Kong Free Press that Gui’s daughter spoke with him on the phone for 40 minutes on October 26. Angela Gui told Hong Kong’s RTHK that she had received a phone call, but did not confirm it was from her father.

Last year, American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE) created and sold T-shirts to raise funds to support the campaign, led by Angela Gui, to free Gui Minhai.

Penguin Random House to Distribute Grupo Editorial Titles Beginning Next Year

Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial (PRHGE) will be distributed in the U.S. by Penguin Random House through its Westminster, Maryland, facility beginning February 1, 2018, Publishers Weekly reported.

This means that the company will leave Perseus Distribution/Two Rivers Distribution. In addition, the titles from the newly acquired Ediciones B will join PRHGE and will also be distributed by PRH effective February 1. Until that date, they will continue to be distributed by Spanish Publishers.

Hachette Acquires Meadowbrook Press Titles

Hachette Book Group has entered into an agreement to purchase a line of books from Meadowbrook Press, the Minnesota-based pregnancy, childcare, and parenting publisher announced Tuesday.

These books will be published by Da Capo Lifelong Books, part of Perseus Books, and Meadowbrook’s children’s and gift/humor books will be reissued by Running Press, also part of Perseus Books.

The purchased backlist to be updated and published by Lifelong is made up of around 25 titles, including Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn; The Simple Guide to Having a Baby; Discipline with Love and Limits; and the Busy Book series.

Kirkus Prize Winners Announced

The winners of the 2017 Kirkus Prize were announced at a ceremony on November 2 in Austin, Texas.

This year’s winners, each of whom will receive $50,000, are:

• Fiction: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky: Stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah (Riverhead)
• Nonfiction: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis (Liveright/Norton)
• Young Readers’ Literature: The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (DCB)

Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between September 1, 2016, to August 31, 2017, are automatically nominated for the Prize, which is sponsored by Kirkus Reviews. Winners are selected by a panel of writers, booksellers, librarians, and Kirkus critics.

Winner of Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Announced

The winner of the 2017 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award is Bill Beverly for his first novel, Dodgers: A Novel (Crown).

The $25,000 award sponsored by the Mark Twain House & Museum honors “an ‘American voice’ such as Twain established in his masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award will be presented at the museum in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 30, Twain’s birthday.