Reinventing the Path to Publication

The publishing landscape is transforming. Writers at all stages of publication need to understand and embrace the thinking that is reshaping traditional publishing models, and stay current with new ventures and ideas. The industry is moving toward greater diversity and inclusion. And it is trying to balance two potentially conflicting goals—relying  increasingly on data to make editorial decisions yet at the same time working to keep creative originality alive in a competitive marketplace . Engaging with this cultural shift requires flexibility, collaboration, and often, changes in our thinking. This session will put the present publishing landscape in context, then focus on finding solutions for literary problems as well as opening up new possibilities for our writing hopes and dreams.   Author and former Penguin RandomHouse editor Carole DeSanti, longtime industry insider, has wrestled with writers’ aspirations, frustrations and dilemmas for more than thirty years, and as an author, contended with her own.   She’s seen it all and will share her wisdom and her vision for what’s on the horizon.  

~ This event will run virtually. ~

About Carole DeSanti: A longtime acquisitions editor at Penguin RandomHouse, Carole DeSanti is currently Elizabeth Drew Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College. Her first novel The Unruly Passions of Eugénie, a response to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Zola’s Nana, explores a woman’s journey from crisis to awakening in Second Empire France and during the Siege of Paris. A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice, Unruly Passions has been hailed as “a magnificent novel in scope and achievement, powerfully written yet delicately evocative,” and “the poem of female desires: sexual, artistic, political, intellectual, maternal.” (The New York Times Book Review). She is currently at work on a new novel, Plunder: The Exploits and Adventures of the Notorious Pyrates Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Notable titles Carole has published include Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina; Melissa Bank’s A Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing; the award-winning novels of Ruth Ozeki, including Booker-finalist A Tale for the Time Being; Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, and George Hodgman's Bettyville. She edited and published the bestselling novels of Terry McMillan, including How Stella Got her Groove Back and A Day Late and a Dollar Short, and the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness. Her interest in health and wellness led her work on David Servan-Schreiber's pioneering Anticancer,  A New Way of Life, and Mark Wolynn’s book on inherited trauma, It Didn’t Start with You. She also was the editor for TWC’s founder/director Judith Lindbergh’s debut novel, The Thrall’s Tale.

Carole's reviews and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and The Women's Review of Books. She has been profiled in Poets & Writers Magazine and Psychology Today and awarded fellowships and residencies at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, Hedgebrook, and Aspen Words.