Schedule
Please note that sessions and times are subject to change. Please check the final schedule closer to the conference date.
8:00 am - 9:00 am
Great Hall
REGISTRATION OPENS
NETWORKING BREAKFAST
Great Hall
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
OPENING PLENARY
Haft Auditorium
WELCOME & INTRODUCTIONS
HOW SHE LEADS
Meet the innovators and disruptors, visionary leaders shaping the future of the industry.
PANELISTS-
Mary McAveney became President and CEO of Abrams in November 2022, making her the first woman to hold the position in the company’s history. In addition, she sits on the board of Abrams & Chronicle Books. Prior to Abrams, McAveney was the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Revenue Officer at Open Road Integrated Media and her previous positions include senior roles at Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Zondervan, as well as numerous consulting positions with media companies, internet start-ups, and publishers. In 2024, she received the Women’s Media Group Founders Impact Award.
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Sasha Quinton leads Scholastic’s Children’s Book Group, home to bestselling and beloved franchises such as Harry Potter, Dog Man, The Baby-Sitters Club, Clifford, and more; and the company’s iconic Book Fairs and Clubs, providing nearly 30 million kids with equitable access to books while raising over $240M in resources every year for schools and educators. Prior to Scholastic, she held senior leadership roles at Barnes and Noble Inc., the largest U.S. retail bookseller, and ReaderLink Distribution Services, North America’s largest full-service book distributor.
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Dominique Raccah founded Sourcebooks from her home in 1987. Under Dominique's leadership Sourcebooks now ranks as the 5th largest book publisher in the U.S. by print units sold. Dominique was named one of Publishers Weekly’s “Top 25 Book Business Changemakers,” included in the Washington Post’s Post Next 50, a distinguished list of leaders who are “shaping our society in 2025,” and recognized in 2026 as one of INC’s Female Founders for the third year in a row.
MODERATOR 
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Regina Brooks is the founder and CEO of Serendipity Literary Agency, the largest African American owned agency in the country. Since 2024, she has served as president of the Association of American Literary Agents, after serving as Vice President and co-founding the People of Publishing Conference. She was named Woman of the Year by The National Association of Professional Women, A New York Urban League Rising Star Award winner, and a finalist for the Stevie Award for Women Entrepreneurs. She is the author of three books.
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
COFFEE BREAK
10:30 AM - 11:20 AM
CONCURRENT SESSION
TREND SPOTTING: READING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR TO UNDERSTAND WHAT’S NEXT IN BOOKS
In this fast-paced, data-driven presentation, Kristen McLean, Circana’s VP of Client Insights for Books and Entertainment, identifies the major forces that are shaping what people discover, buy, share, collect, and become fans of across entertainment, gaming, beauty, apparel, retail, social commerce, and other consumer markets—and how they offer important clues for book publishing. The session addresses:
Where consumer demand grew, softened, or shifted across book categories
What consumer behavior in gaming, entertainment, apparel, beauty, and other markets may tell us about readers
How book discovery and purchasing behaviors are changing and where retail and social commerce are taking them
What fandom, community, licensing, and co-branding reveal about how consumers engage
How to distinguish meaningful shifts from short-term noise
How to translate consumer data into decisions about acquisition, positioning, marketing, and audience development
PRESENTER-
Kristen McLean, Vice President of Client insights, is the leader of the Circana Entertainment Knowledge Group, Industry Advisor for both the US Toys and Books businesses, and a widely recognized expert in licensing and cross-entertainment consumer behavior. She works with a range of Circana’s largest manufacturers, retailers, and media clients to uncover key cultural trends. She works with a range of manufacturers, retailers, and media clients to uncover key cultural trends.
CONCURRENT SESSION
MANAGING YOUR LIST WITH STRATEGY & INTENTION
How to reshape, rebuild, optimize and even overhaul your list to support your career goals
PANELISTS-
Aram Fox began his career by fleeing from academia and landing on the development side of the film and tv business. From there he went to what is now Hachette Book Group and then at age 26, launched a book scouting agency where he spent the next 23 years representing a wonderful roster of international publishers and U.S. film/tv companies, before joining Massie McQuilkin and Altman in 2023 where he represents adult fiction and nonfiction
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Ashley Hong, an editor at Crown Currency, focuses on nonfiction, from business books steeped in practical wisdom to personal development that helps ambitious readers find their way amid chaos. Before joining Crown Currency, she was a literary agent at Gardner Literary and previously an editor at Convergent where she acquired and edited the New York Times bestselling A Rhythm of Prayer by Sarah Bessey and This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley.
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Emilia Rhodes is an Executive Editor at Atria Books/Simon & Schuster where she publishes romance and fantasy. Emilia’s list at Atria includes New York Times bestselling authors Chelsea Curto, Penn Cole, Ellis Hunter, Haley Pham, and more. Prior to joining Atria, Emilia has previously held positions at HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Alloy Entertainment, and Simon Pulse.
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Monica Rodriguez is senior literary agent and Director of Brand Management at Context Literary Agency. Her mission is to uplift underrepresented voices in publishing, specifically within the Latinx community. She’s mentored authors at The Writing Barn and led workshops at Inked Voices and SCBWI. She is a faculty member at The Manuscript Academy and at Gotham Writers Workshop. She runs a podcast called Find A Lovely Life.
MODERATOR
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As a publishing executive, editor, and New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly 50 books, Andrea Davis Pinkey has held leadership and executive roles at Disney Publishing Worldwide, Houghton Mifflin Company, Simon & Schuster and Essence magazine. She is currently Vice President, Executive Editor at Scholastic. Her publishing portfolio includes National Book Award winners, Newbery Honor books, and Coretta Scott King Award winners. Pinkney is a four-time NAACP Image Award nominee, New York Writers Hall of Fame inductee, and is among Good Morning America’s GMA “Who’s Making Black History Now?” notables.
CONCURRENT SESSION
ROUNDTABLES SESSION 1
Intimate, peer-led discussions organized by genre and topic. Please note that you must sign up for a roundtable spot in advance via a link you receive upon registration and availability is on a first come, first serve.
11:30 AM - 12:20 PM
CONCURRENT SESSION
BEHIND THE BESTSELLER LISTS
A provocative and insider discussion of how bestseller lists are compiled, what authors can do to improve their chance of landing on a list, what they signal, and where their influence begins and ends.
PANELISTS
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Troy D. Johnson is the founder and President of the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC), the oldest and largest independent platform dedicated to books by and about people of African descent. He is the creator of the BLK Bestsellers List, the first national bestseller list dedicated exclusively to books by Black authors. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Independent Book Publishers Association and a founding board member of the National Association of Black Bookstores. Before launching AALBC full-time, Johnson held leadership roles at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
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Charlie Fusco, the founder of TGC Worldwide, has led launch strategy behind more than 100 bestselling titles, including six New York Times bestsellers in 2025. Her career began in direct-response media at 20, scaled into a multimillion-dollar agency, and evolved into what she does now: helping authors and public figures turn a single book into a broader commercial ecosystem. She understands how bestseller lists get made because she has been engineering outcomes against them for over a decade.
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Richard Rhorer is the founding publisher of Simon Element, which has placed more than 30 titles on the New York Times bestseller list since its inaugural list in 2022. Richard launched Simon Acumen in 2024 to specialize in books focused on professional growth. Previously, he spent a decade as Deputy Publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint, directing publication strategies for Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat; Jay Shetty’s Think Like a Monk; and Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive along with dozens of others. Rhorer has held several marketing and publishing roles throughout his career.
MODERATOR-
As the founder of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations, Kathleen brings 30 years of experience creating and leading impactful, strategic global media, marketing, and branding campaigns for politicians, A-list celebrities, athletes, and other high-profile personalities. To date, she has contributed to 50 New York Times bestsellers. Kathleen is the author of the widely read Substack newsletter, Publishing Confidential and of a forthcoming book about the book business publishing in 2028.
CONCURRENT SESSION
MORE THAN MIDDLEMEN: OLD RULES, PRESENT REALITIES, NEW POSSIBILITIES
For generations, literary agents have been described as the middlemen between authors and publishers. But their work has never been limited to passing manuscripts from one side to the other. Agents have helped shape books, build careers, influence literary taste, and determine which voices reach the marketplace.
Drawing on the history explored in Laura McGraths' Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction and findings from AALA’s membership survey, this conversation examines how the profession’s longstanding rules are colliding with present-day realities. The agent once associated with telephone calls, a Rolodex, and publishing lunches now navigates corporate consolidation, reduced editorial capacity, virtual relationships, sales data, social media, artificial intelligence, and growing expectations to provide editorial, strategic, and career guidance.
Can traditional commission structures sustain the work modern agenting requires? Are these pressures changing the partnership between agents and editors? Are they influencing who can afford to remain in the profession, and which authors receive long-term support? The conversation will also consider new possibilities: more transparent collaboration, more sustainable ways of working, broader access to the profession, and a renewed appreciation for the human judgment and advocacy required to bring consequential books into the world.
IN CONVERSATION
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Laura B. McGrath is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Literature (Princeton UP, 2026). McGrath’s writing on books, publishing, and data has appeared The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books, and writes the popular publishing substack, textCrunch. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Smithsonian Institute of American History, and the New York Public Library.
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For over 20 years, Lynn Johnston has represented numerous New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and USA Today bestsellers and a multitude of “best of” honorees for their influence in business and society. Her authors have won the Pulitzer George Polk, Peabody, Global Teaching Prize (finalist) and GLAAD Award, to name a few. She served two terms on the AALA Board and currently serves on the Governance and Contracts committees.
CONCURRENT SESSION
ROUNDTABLES SESSION 2
Intimate, peer-led discussions organized by genre and topic. Please note that you must sign up for a roundtable spot in advance via a link you receive upon registration and availability is on a first come, first serve.
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
LUNCH BREAK
2:00 pm - 2:50 PM
CONCURRENT SESSION
WINNING BEFORE PUBLICATION
Long before a book reaches the shelf, a series of decisions, campaigns, orders, and early responses are already shaping its trajectory. The discussion takes attendees inside that critical pre-publication window to examine how publishers, retailers, platforms, and marketing partners work to build and assess demand before a book goes on sale. The panel explores:
The role of pre-orders, what makes an effective pre-order campaign, how publishers decide where and when to invest marketing resources, and what early indicators of interest can tell us about a book’s potential.
The mechanics behind retailers’ laydown and initial orders: how retailers determine how many copies to bring in, what influences placement and inventory, how books are positioned and discovered by the trade, and what can cause expectations for a title to rise or fall as publication approaches.
What happens when pre-orders outperform expectations? What can be done when they lag? And how much opportunity is there to change a book’s trajectory before publication day?
Bringing together perspectives from publishing, bookselling, marketing, and the platforms that connect books with the trade, Winning Before Publication will provide a clearer view of what happens between acquisition and on-sale and the decisions agent and editors can influence to help give a book its strongest possible start.
PANELISTS-
Allen Befort, co-founder and CEO of Givington's, a bestseller-reporting retailer and direct-to-consumer ecommerce agency serving the publishing industry and content-driven brands. Founded in 2012, Givington's occupies a distinct position at the intersection of traditional publishing and modern DTC ecommerce and has been involved in hundreds of bestsellers and millions of direct-to-consumer orders in support of authors and content brands.
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Jules Herbert has more than 30 years of bookselling experience, beginning his Barnes & Noble career in the bookstores. As Campaign Manager for multiple high-profile subjects, he identifies the key priority titles and develops compelling and successful promotional strategies to support and maximize sales in stores and online.
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Jenn Northington has worked in publishing since 2004 wearing various hats, including bookseller, events manager, and reviewer. She's the co-editor of two anthologies:
MODERATORCONCURRENT SESSION
ROUNDTABLES SESSION 3
Intimate, peer-led discussions organized by genre and topic. Please note that you must sign up for a roundtable spot in advance via a link you receive upon registration and availability is on a first come, first serve.
3:00 pm - 3:50 PM
CONCURRENT SESSION
EVERYTHING BUT THE AUCTION
How do you compete for projects without necessarily bidding the highest? The panel addresses options, preempts and other strategies to get the project you really want, particularly when you don’t have an unlimited budget.
PANELISTS-
John Cusick is an SVP and Literary Agent with Folio Literary Management, representing a diverse list of award-winners and New York Times bestsellers. He is the author of two young adult novels and a middle-grade duology from Candlewick Press and HarperCollins Children's, respectively. John is also a co-founder of Bittersweet Books, a story production and packaging company creatively helmed by NYT Bestseller Julie Murphy.
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Priya Doraswamy is the founder and sole agent at the Lotus Lane Literary agency. She is passionate and dedicated to the intentional expansion of diversity and inclusivity in the publishing and Film/TV industries. Her clients have won several prestigious awards including long listed for the Booker Prize, The National Book Award, and The Faulkner Pen America Prize. Priya is also an Oscar nominated Executive Producer of feature documentary To Kill A Tiger.
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Colleen Lawrie is editorial director of nonfiction at Bloomsbury. Previously, she was the editorial director at Hachette / PublicAffairs and has published New York Times bestsellers National Book Critics Circle Award finalists and winners and other notable titles. She lives in the spooky, literary town of Sleepy Hollow, New York.
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Donna Bray, Senior Vice Prsident and Co-Publisehr of Balzer +Bray, an imprint founded in 2008 and relaunched at Macmillan Publishers in 2024, has edited and published numerous groundbreaking, award-winning, bestselling books across categories and genres.
MODERATOR-
Madeline McIntosh is cofounder, CEO and Publisher of Authors Equity, an independent publisher that shares the majority of profit with its authors. She is an independent director of Simon & Schuster and of Lee Enterprises, and President of the Board of Poets & Writers, the nation's oldest nonprofit dedicated to supporting writers. Previously, she was the US CEO of Penguin Random House.
CONCURRENT SESSION
WHO WROTE THIS? AI, AUTHORSHIP AND THE NEW TRUST TEST
Generative AI has blurred the line between assistance and authorship, leaving agents, editors, platforms, and readers to confront a deceptively simple question: Who or what wrote this? This session addresses what detection tools can and cannot establish, when writers should disclose their use of AI, and how the industry should respond when a manuscript or published work is flagged. The conversation also explores how publishers and platforms are integrating AI, and how emerging licensing models can give creators meaningful choice, control, and compensation, while considering how technology and human expertise can work together to protect intellectual property, encourage responsible innovation, and strengthen reader trust.
PANELISTS-
Bradley Emi is the co-founder and CTO of Pangram, a research lab that detects AI-generated content. He is an AI researcher and expert in building deep learning products in the industry. He previously led the deep learning research group at Absci, a generative AI drug discovery company, and previously was a member of the core computer vision team at Tesla Autopilot.
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Jane C. Ginsburg, U. Chicago (BA 1976, MA 1977), Harvard (JD 1980) Université de Paris II (DEA 1985, Dott. 1995) is the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at Columbia University School of Law. She writes about domestic and international copyright and trademarks law.
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Matthew Moore is General Counsel at Created by Humans, a platform on a mission to preserve human creativity and help it continue to thrive by working to solve the licensing, credit, and compensation issues in the AI era. Matthew has been a trusted legal leader for innovative, high-growth companies for more than a decade and has over 20 years of experience in the media and entertainment industries. Outside of the office, Moore is the proud dad of 13-week old, a published author, diehard music fan, and occasional NYC DJ.
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Todd Shuster, Co-CEO of Aevitas Creative Management, represents a broad range of nonfiction and fiction authors and has helped shepherd films to the big screen, including Wild, The Pursuit of Happyness, and the Netflix-released feature film The Midnight Sky, on which he served as executive producer. He co-founded the literary agency Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, which in 2016 merged with Kuhn Projects to form Aevitas. Todd is helping lead Aevitas’ development of ethically and legally appropriate AI-related policies and best practices in collaboration with the agency’s authors, its agents and staff, publishers and industry associations.
MODERATOR-
Bryan Walsh, senior writer and editor at Coefficient Giving, the philanthropic funder formerly known as Open Philanthropy, writes Vox’s weekly Good News newsletter. He joined Vox in 2021 as editor of Future Perfect. Before that he wrote the Axios Future newsletter and spent fifteen years at Time, where he served as Tokyo bureau chief. He is the author of End Times, a book about existential risk and how humanity might survive it — reporting that took him from asteroid-tracking observatories to biosecurity labs, and left him more optimistic than he expected.
4:00 pm - 5:00 PM
CLOSING SESSION
POWER PAIRS: AGENTS & EDITORS ON HOW THEY COLLABORATE TO SHAPE BOOKS THAT WIN
Agent and editor teams share how they collaborated to bring a title to market, offering behind-the-scenes insight into decisions that in hindsight made the difference and set the book up for extraordinary success.
THE POWER PAIR BEHIND YESTERYEAR BY CARO CLAIRE BURKE
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Jenny Jackson is a Vice President and Editorial Director of Fiction at Knopf; she joined the group in 2002. She publishes a range of literary and commercial fiction, from Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, to Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. Jenny is also an author and her novels, Pineapple Street and The Shampoo Effect, are published by Pamela Dorman Books at Viking. She is a graduate of Williams College and attended the Columbia Publishing Course.
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Lisa Grubka represents a variety of fiction and non-fiction authors. Her writers have won the National Book Award and the PEN American Literary Award, and she has represented dozens of New York Times Best Sellers. Her clients’ books have been successfully adapted for television and translated into more than 30 languages. Lisa joined UTA in 2023 after beginning her career at FSG, the William Morris Agency, and Fletcher & Co.
THE POWER PAIR BEHIND STRANGERS BY BELLE BURDEN
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Whitney Frick, VP, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, The Dial Press. Whitney has focused her editorial career on helping to shape and amplify the voices of women. She has published several critically-lauded and bestselling books, including Strangers by Belle Burden;Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano; Isola by Allegra Goodman; On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen; I’ll Have What She’s Having by Chelsea Handler, and Untamed by Glennon Doyle. Whitney is proud to lead a team of passionate, expert editors at The Dial Press.
THE POWER PAIR BEHIND A CHILDREN’S SERIES THAT SOLD MORE THAN 25 MILLION COPIES
MODERATOR
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Kirsten Hall is the Founder and President of Catbird, a boutique New York City agency represents clients whose works includes nearly 20 New York Times bestsellers, a Caldecott Medal winner, a Caldecott Honor book, and numerous other major industry honors. Kirsten is also an award-winning author.
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Susanna Einstein started her publishing career in editorial at Warner Books (now Grand Central Publishing), and then worked as a literary and film scout for Maria B. Campbell Associates before becoming an agent in 2005, working first at LJK Literary, then at Einstein Thompson Agency, and then running Einstein Literary Management for ten years before joining Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.
5:00 pm - 7:00 PM
PEOPLE OF PUBLISHING RECEPTION
Opportunities are limited these days to meet publishing colleagues organically. Stay for the People of Publishing reception to compare notes about the day, catch up with people you know as well as those you just met, and connect in real life.