Here are Chicago’s Publishers, Services and Other Media
49 Maya Piña Executive Director, El BeiSMan
Maya Piña, a transmigrant woman originally from Querétaro, Mexico, based in Pilsen, is the founder and executive director of El BeiSMan, a nonprofit open collective of journalists and educators that publishes a bilingual digital magazine. She also created the Feria del libro in Chicago, a Spanish-language book fair. She oscillates between being a cultural manager, arts advocate and business entrepreneur. Piña has co-founded multiple cultural and literary magazines in Chicago: Fe de erratas, zorros y erizos, Tropel and Contratiempo.
Hailey Dezort and Leah von Essen/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
Emma McMullen and Ashley Hasty/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
Caro Paniagua/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
46 Hailey Dezort, Ashley Hasty, Emma McMullen, Caro Paniagua, Leah von Essen Bookstagrammers
What do Hailey Dezort, Ashley Hasty, Emma McMullen, Caro Paniagua, Leah von Essen have in common? Just one thing, and that is that they are all part of an influential trend in publishing called “bookstagramming,” meaning they use their social media feed to promote books they’ve read, are reading, plan to read or, in some cases, simply recommend. Hailey Dezort, the marketing manager for Kaye Publicity by day, started out as a bookstagrammer in college (@hayhails, 3,340 followers) and now has an “in real life book club” in which she “met all of the girls through bookstagram, which was really cool… I didn’t have a ton of friends who were reading and so that was the community I found.” During the pandemic she got into comics and started a comics-focused bookstagram that’s been rapidly growing in size and influence, including an expansion into YouTube (@chicomic_girl, 3,348 followers). Five years ago, bookstagrammer Ashley Hasty (@ashleyhasty, 7,319 followers) started a book blog (hastybooklist.com), and has seen a hobby expand to include 600 author interviews and relationships with over 200 publicists. She has a PhD in fashion history—”in a previous life I was a fashion history instructor for college students”—and favors historical fiction, but also covers thrillers and romance. She’s working on her own historical fiction novel, so might soon find herself on the other side of the conversation. By day, Emma McMullen (@bookstagr.em, 5,794 followers) is an attorney who works at a nonprofit, doing domestic violence work. But books are her hobby, and three years ago she started sharing, on her Instagram, the highlights of the 150 to 200 books a year she reads. Her tastes? “Literary fiction is my primary. And then as a subgenre, particularly women authors and feminist nonfiction is another subcategory that I’m interested in. But I’ll pretty much read anything.” Caro Paniagua (@sanjariti, 6,888 followers) spends her days as a prevention educator at a domestic violence agency, but started bookstagramming three years ago with a focus on BIPOC authors writing fiction. “When I was a kid growing up, I didn’t see myself in a lot of fiction books… Getting to read Latinx authors’ books and seeing my culture and my identity represented in those pages, it’s like inner-child healing in a way, but these books have also really helped me come into my queer identity, which is also another thing that I’m really passionate about.” Leah von Essen spends her days as the editor-in-chief of the alumni magazine for the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, but launched a blog (whilereadingandwalking.com) in order to get into book reviewing, followed soon by her bookstagram (@whilereadingandwalking, 3,123 followers). She now writes for Book Riot (covering, among other things, books in translation) and reviews for Booklist, all of which keeps her reading about 200 books a year. “I read fantasy, literary fiction, contemporary, nonfiction, whatever. I just happen to be reading whatever I’m interested in.”
Chris Green, Michele Morano and Miles Harvey/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
42 Chris Green, Michele Morano and Miles Harvey Founding Editors, Big Shoulders Books, DePaul University
Chris Green, Michele Morano and Miles Harvey are founding editors of the nonprofit, social-justice-focused publisher Big Shoulders Books, which has more than 100,000 copies of its publications in circulation worldwide. Big Shoulders gives DePaul University students hands-on experience in the publishing world. Continuing in the oral history tradition of Studs Terkel, Big Shoulders also offers an outlet for voices that otherwise mght not be heard. Available for free to those who need them, the books include “How Long Will I Cry?” (used for an anti-violence program at Cook County Jail) and “American Gun,” a poem on gun violence by one-hundred Chicagoans. Coming soon is a book about the pandemic, “Virus City.” “Our students are coming out of our program knowing how to produce books,” Harvey says.
41 Danielle Egan-Miller President and Owner, Browne & Miller Literary Associates
Danielle Egan-Miller is the president and owner of Browne & Miller Literary Associates, a position that she has held since 2003. Egan-Miller started as an assistant to Jane Jordan Browne at a time when very few literary agents worked outside of New York. Browne & Miller continues to be Chicago’s leading literary agency. Egan-Miller is a vivacious reader across genres, and among her clients are New York Times-bestselling authors, including Minnesota’s William Kent Krueger. A proud Chicagoan, Egan-Miller continues to seek Midwestern writers. She has been gratified to see the publishing industry embrace more diverse voices outside of New York.
Gerald Brennan/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
40 Gerald Brennan Founder and Publisher, Tortoise Books
Slow and steady wins the race, teaches Aesop’s tortoise; that lesson guides Jerry Brennan’s determination to compete with big publishing. “Chicago has a fantastic literary tradition,” he reflects. Yet, “there were not a lot of solid indie publishers here” when he founded Tortoise Books in 2012. Himself a writer (“Alone on the Moon” is his most recent novel), Brennan strives to find and support quality manuscripts and authors overlooked by the behemoths. Tortoise has launched a remarkable forty-four titles in just ten years and has seven more scheduled through spring 2023. Success for a book, says Brennan, “is not just sales or awards. You have to aim for the heart of the reader and trust that other stuff is going to follow.”
Run entirely by and for a team of Spanish-language thinkers, Contratiempo has become home to learning, mentorship and conversations that don’t require translating thoughts, identity and cultural connotations. Executive director Stephanie Manruiquez comes from a public radio background. She is a journalist, teaching artist, multicultural guide and social activist. She is also the Communities Amplified Multilingual Initiative Executive Producer at Lumpen Radio and was the 2020 Leaders for a New Chicago Awardee by the Field Foundation. Founded in 2003, Contratiempo’s programs range from the bimonthly magazine and writing workshops to public radio and a podcast. Manruiquez is inspired by the love and enthusiasm from all involved that helps build ownership around the programming. “Contratiempo is a lot of ‘we’s,” she says, “It’s powerful to say that it is the work of many. Currently we are all volunteers and what we create is what we are proud of, we need to work with joy.” She is working toward a sustainable structure where anyone passionate about Spanish language not only gets recognized but is paid for their labor.
38 Richard Jones Editor, Poetry East
Now a prolific poet and English professor at DePaul, Richard Jones started Poetry East more than forty years ago—it recently published a special one-hundredth issue—and has nurtured it into a highly respected if underappreciated place in the literary world. Guided by his singular editorial vision, the publication is noteworthy for many things: introducing new poets, a passion for the visual arts and special theme issues about cities, the process of writing and even individual poets. As Miles Harvey says, “I’m always surprised to find that this journal is better recognized all over the country than it is in Chicago.” Jones remains optimistic, literally, when asked about the future of Poetry East. “The two recent issues of Poetry East—’The Optimist’ and ‘Postcards to the World’—carry a message of hope and affirmation in spite of the darkness around us,” Jones says. “It will always be Poetry East’s mission to gather poems and art that celebrate life, endurance, and all those many unsung things which sustain us.”
Sheryl Johnston/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
33 Sheryl Johnston Literary Publicist
As an independent literary publicist, Sheryl Johnston has worked with over a hundred writers over the last twenty-plus years, including Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell and Chicago writers Don DeGrazia and Amina Gautier. Johnston had a long career in PR, including opening an agency that focused on entertainment such as TV specials before turning to literary publicity. Her studies at Columbia College Chicago’s fiction writing program led her to her current career. This fall, Johnston is looking forward to two new books by Christine Sneed and the release of Hannah Sward’s memoir “Strip.”
Syed Haider/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
31 Syed Haider Founder and Senior Editor, Chicago Quarterly Review
Author of two novels, Syed Haider studied under legendary University of Chicago writing teacher Molly Daniels-Ramanujan. He started the Chicago Quarterly Review with the help of fellow class members back in 1994. Now the esteemedReview gets as many as 150 submissions a month from around the world. Stories from the Review have been included in “Best American Short Stories,” “O. Henry Prize Stories,” the “Pushcart Prize” anthology and “Best American Essays.” Current staff includes senior editor Elizabeth McKenzie, fiction editor John Blades and managing editor Gary Houston. “We are humbled, honored and proud of the growth of our magazine creatively and thrilled by our expanding readership all over the world,” Haider says. The Review is working on a collection of Ukrainian prose, poetry and art for the spring of 2023.
Jan Bottiglieri, Angela Narciso Torres and Virginia Bell/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
24 Virginia Bell, Jan Bottiglieri, Angela Narciso Torres Editors, RHINO Poetry
Started in the 1970s as a publishing outlet for the Evanston-based Poetry Forum, RHINO has long since evolved into a premier Chicago poetry magazine. Known for its aesthetic beauty in its long-running print edition and even with its digital presence, RHINO has a reputation for publishing forward-thinking and eclectic poetry. Editor Virginia Bell, speaking on behalf of RHINO’s masthead trio, credits RHINO’s success and longevity to its continued status as a grassroots, “small ‘d’ democratic organization,” unaffiliated with a publisher or campus, where their volunteer editorial staff is allowed great latitude to push in innovative directions. Also reflecting back to its humble roots, RHINO as an organization still hosts the Poetry Forum workshop but has also expanded to have a reading series (RHINO Reads) as well as an online poetry book review series (RHINO Reviews). As for its aesthetic beauty, RHINO’s distinctive covers always feature emerging local Chicago artists.
23 Christopher Borrelli Features Writer, Chicago Tribune
There’s no longer a book editor at the Chicago Tribune or even any full-time writer on the literary scene. But Christopher Borrelli, along with columnist Rick Kogan, is still profiling authors and spotlighting books, on top of his other features assignments. Borrelli has worked for fourteen years at the Tribune and has always done stories on books, but stepped up his efforts in the past two years, with staff losses at the paper. His trick is to get up at 4am, drive from his Rogers Park home to the Northwestern University campus, and just read while his family is still asleep. “I felt there needs to be someone doing it regularly. It sounds corny, but I’m trying to keep it in the paper. You need some kind of serious coverage. There are so many good stories out there.”
Greta Johnsen/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
17 Greta Johnsen Host-Producer, Nerdette podcast
When Greta Johnsen left her home in Alaska to get a master’s at Medill, she was already on the broadcasting fast-track, thanks to the public radio experience she’d accumulated in a short time in Fairbanks. She started Nerdette ten years ago with her friend, then also at WBEZ, Tricia Bobeda: “We started it, I think, because we were both too awkward to say we should be friends with each other. So we were like, we should start a podcast.” Nerdette is a show with books at its core, but not exclusively, except for the two episodes a month of the Nerdette Book Club. Future plans include some deep dives on aspects of the publishing industry to air this fall, including audiobooks, cover design and blurbs, and adaptations. “When I really think about it, when I really boil it down, what I get really excited about with Nerdette is the idea of getting to read a book and then getting to talk to the person who wrote it, it’s just like a total dream.”
George Kendall/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
16 George Kendall Editor and Publisher, Booklist
Though Baltimore native George Kendall earned his publishing chops in the medical field in Chicago before taking over Booklist just over three years ago, he’d earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he studied under future Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, so this new role was an ideal melding of skill and passion. In addition to overseeing a staff of twenty that publishes about 8,000 book reviews a year, principally for librarians seeking ideas for additions to their collections, Kendall has launched Booklist Reader, intended to fulfill a desire to get “all of our great content to reach a much wider audience” he says, by expanding its reach to library patrons as well. Currently digital, the paid publication will launch a print edition in January.
Julie Fain/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
8 Julie Fain Co-founder and Publisher, Haymarket Books
Julie Fain is a cofounder and publisher of Chicago-based Haymarket Books, a left-wing press that specializes in books with social justice themes. In March 2020, Fain braced herself for the worst, but instead, people began reading in rapid numbers. 2021 marked Haymarket’s biggest year of sales in its twenty-year history. This year, Fain helped oversee the opening of Haymarket House in Uptown, a literary, cultural and community space that also serves local organizations with radical missions. Haymarket continues to have a strong Chicago presence, and Fain is excited about upcoming books by Chicago writers Diamond Sharp, Shira Hassan and Helen Shiller.
Joe Matthews/Photo: Sally Blood (Sandy Morris)
5 Joe Matthews CEO, Independent Publishers Group
After failing to get a music business off the ground, Joe Matthews joined his parents’ book publishing and distribution business in 2006 at the age of thirty. His parents, Curt and Linda Matthews, had started the company as Chicago Review Press in 1973. (They “started publishing books sort of out of the attic of their house,” Joe says.) When his father retired in 2015, Joe took over as CEO of what by then included the original imprint plus Triumph Books, acquired in 2011, and the national book distributor, Independent Publishers Group, with net sales at the time estimated to be $50 million. Since then, they’ve expanded their ebooks distribution business to about twenty percent of revenue (in-house publishing is about fifteen percent), added a digital printing arm in 2018 that’s since printed a million books, and, in October of last year, acquired a group of four distribution companies in the UK. “We’ve expanded into the second-largest English-speaking book market in the world, the UK,” Joe says, “because I just feel like what the industry needs now is one contract for global English, language sales and distribution. So we’re now positioned to do that.” It’s a big gamble, basically doubling the company’s headcount by adding about 240 employees in the UK to the 230 already on board in the United States. Today, they have “something like twenty million books in stock, probably something like 70,000 titles and I think we’re certainly a top-twenty supplier of books in the English-speaking [world],” Joe says. What’s on the horizon? “At the moment it’s stabilizing the UK and integrating it with our US operations, building out a new global management team, all these challenges that I didn’t see coming,” Joe says. “I was way too naive. If you made a movie about the American kid who comes to the UK to try a new business, I would be the star of that comedy.”
The Hall of Fame
These folks, or the roles they inhabit, are so well-established and foundational to the literary world of Chicago that they are always near the top of the list. *= new this year
*Parneshia Jones Director and Poetry Editor, Northwestern University Press
*Garrett P. Kiely Director, University of Chicago Press
*Rick Kogan Chicago Tribune columnist and After Hours host, WGN Radio
Haki Madhubuti Publisher, Third World Press
Dominique Raccah Founder, President, Publisher and Series Editor, Sourcebooks
Kathleen Rooney Author, Poet and Co-Founder, Rose Metal Press
Donna Seaman Senior Editor, Booklist and Advisory Council Member, American Writers Museum
Doug Seibold Publisher, Agate Publishing
*Mark Suchomel Senior Vice President, Baker & Taylor Publisher Services
Elizabeth Taylor Co-Editor, The National Book Review
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