Press Shop PR

05/12/2026

Spring at Press Shop PR has been jam-packed with pub days, events, media hits, and now, some very welcome greenery in Prospect Park!

Two of our authors just received major honors. Haley Cohen Gilliland, whose debut A FLOWER TRAVELED THROUGH MY BLOOD (Simon & Schuster Books) tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and their fight to find their stolen grandchildren during Argentina's dictatorship, was just named a Pulitzer finalist.

And Ieva Jusionyte, author of EXIT WOUNDS, on the American guns flowing south into Mexico, was named a Guggenheim fellow — following her MacArthur grant last year. We are over the moon for both of them!

Congratulations to Atima Omara, author of THE INSTIGATORS: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy (And What We Can Learn From Them), and her publisher HarperCollins Publishers, on pub day last week. We're celebrating her feature in the Boston Globe, "How Black Women Instigate for Democracy": https://bit.ly/4uiIGYQ and this recent conversation with Chuck Todd: “What Does A Winning Democratic Coalition Look Like In ‘28?” https://bit.ly/4uEb8nP

We worked with behavioral scientist Leidy Klotz on SUBTRACT in 2022 and are thrilled to be back for IN A GOOD PLACE, just published by Little, Brown and Company. It's full of surprising insights into how the smallest adjustments to your spaces can make outsized differences in your relationships, your work life, and your sense of self. Tune in to upcoming interviews on Next Big Idea Club, Good Life Project, Art of Charm, Something You Should Know, and many more.

Carlos Orsi, author of WHAT SCIENCE SAYS ABOUT ASTROLOGY (the first in the new “What Science Says” series from Columbia University Press) had a great excerpt in Live Science: https://bit.ly/42r2YDv

And an excellent essay in Slate: “The Problem With Astrology: Most people know it’s bogus. But dabbling in it anyway isn’t as harmless as it may seem.”
https://bit.ly/4eCYlxo

Photo: Press Shop PR’s star senior publicist Emma McGlashen and me at the publication party for J.R. Thornton's LUCIEN, a dark academia novel that Town & Country called “a pin-sharp page turner.” A fantastic party for a book that's impossible to put down.

05/06/2026

I met so many smart, creative, and inspiring higher ed journalists and media folks at the Lumina Foundation's Attention Economy Journalist Conference in Indianapolis! Publications represented at this event include The Hechinger Report, PBS NewsHour, PRX The World, The Washington Monthly, Capital B, Wisconsin Watch, CalMatters, and The Texas Tribune.

In addition to delivering hard-hitting reporting on the complex and often fraught topic of higher education, many of them are experimenting—trying new formats for sharing their work, tight subject focus to stand out, analog outreach to hard-to-reach communities, creative approaches to crowdsourcing story ideas, and novel ways of engaging students in reporting work.

At a time when there's a lot of troubling news about the news, this gathering is giving me genuine hope for the future of journalism. There's a real hunger for good information presented well—and there are a lot of talented people here figuring out how to deliver it. Gigantic thanks to Lumina Foundation’s Kevin Corcoran and Mandy Facer for their vision and their support for all of this work.

Pictured: me and Press Shop PR's brilliant associate publicist Nora Sullivan Horner co-leading a panel with Paul Glastris, the Editor in Chief of of The Washington Monthly, and Brandis Griffith Friedman, host of Chicago Tonight on Chicago's PBS station WTTW, on how to help high-quality journalism travel farther and find new audiences.

04/22/2026

Eyck Freymann, author of DEFENDING TAIWAN: Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford University Press), had an excellent—albeit sobering—interview on MSNOW’s Morning Joe. He walks through what's at stake if China invades Taiwan or imposes a military blockade, given that Taiwan manufactures 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors.

Freymann (www.eyckfreymann.com) argues that Beijing has been closely watching the Strait of Hormuz, and could replicate those tactics in the Strait of Taiwan—with even more painful results for the global economy.

You can watch the clip here (min 2:36):
https://bit.ly/48ilb9H

04/17/2026

What a wonderful whirlwind of a Whiting Award week!

We kicked off Wednesday with an intimate winners' lunch ; then the ten winners of this year's award were announced and celebrated at a ceremony and reception at the gorgeous The New York Historical that evening. A media lunch and interviews followed on Thursday, and the festivities were topped off with a brilliant reading at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn last night.

Gigantic congratulations to this incredible cohort! We’re looking forward to working with them going forward … and to sleeping a tremendous amount this weekend!

—Negar Azimi - Nonfiction
—Elaine Castillo - Fiction
—Karen Hao - Nonfiction
—Hajar Hussaini - Poetry
—Hilary Leichter - Fiction
—Lara Mimosa Montes - Fiction
—Brittany Rogers - Poetry
—Alison C. Rollins - Poetry
—Celine Song - Drama
—Carvell Wallace - Nonfiction

NPR covers the Whiting Awards announcement here: https://bit.ly/3OunO1a

Read more about the winners & check out excerpts of their work on the Whiting Foundation’s website: https://bit.ly/3QkmyhO

04/14/2026

University of Texas law professor Mechele Dickerson spoke with Walter Isaacson on Amanpour & Company about her new book THE MIDDLE-CLASS NEW DEAL (University of California Press). Her argument is simple and damning: the decline of the American middle class isn't inevitable — it's a policy choice. The GI Bill created mass upward mobility after WWII, and the tools exist to do it again. On homeownership, education, and more, Dickerson shows exactly what needs to be done. Washington has simply chosen not to do it.

Mechele writes in the book about her own middle-class upbringing and that of her sons, and in a delightful touch, the show shared photos of her parents and her two (grown) boys!

https://youtu.be/ZJx_e7ZGAe0

03/19/2026

Attention nonfiction authors, those who work with, or those who love nonfiction authors!

The Whiting Foundation has just opened applications for its 2026 Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress—any writer working on a creative, deeply researched work of nonfiction under contract with a US, UK, or Canadian publisher is eligible to submit. The grant ($40,000) is intended to give authors a boost at a crucial point in their process—when significant progress has been made but they need more time and resources to complete the final project.

Among the eligible categories: history, biography, memoir, cultural and political reportage, science, philosophy, criticism, graphic nonfiction, and personal essays.

Applications are due May 31, 2026.

Full details and application link: https://www.whiting.org/writers/creative-nonfiction-grant/about

Feel free to pass this along to anyone who might be a fit!

Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress Intensely researched nonfiction books, written with an artful sensitivity to depth and nuance, have always been important in shaping the way we understand the world; today they are essential.

02/24/2026

Twenty-plus inches of snow did not stop Mechele Dickerson from talking last night on The Daily Show about how to rebuild the middle class, something the US government has the ability to do—just like it did after the Depression and WWII—but now lacks the necessary resolve. On the show and in her new book from University of California Press, THE MIDDLE CLASS NEW DEAL: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream, she zeroes in on issues around housing, zoning, the tax code, employment, and education and offers concrete solutions to make life more livable for Americans struggling in a society where wealth is funneled upwards. It’s a fantastic interview, and Jon Stewart is right; she really might have been the nicest person on the entire West Side last night!

The segment: https://bit.ly/4scKK3u

The book: https://bit.ly/4s8HI00

The pic: Mechele and Jon meeting in the green room before the taping!

01/22/2026

Last night we celebrated the ten brilliant winners of this year's Whiting Nonfiction Grant and it was an absolute joy! The authors, their agents and editors, the whole Whiting Foundation, and so many members of the literary community were there to toast good work and good people.

Photo of the winners: (Paul Bogard, Jason Cherkis, S.C. Cornell, Caitlin Dickerson, Elena Dudum, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Will Harris, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Avi Steinberg, Raksha Vasudevan, Leah Broad).

Photo of the Press Shop PR team with Whiting executive director Constantia Constantinou: Andy Davis, Emma McGlashen, Nora Sullivan Horner, and Press Shop alum Brianne Kane, now Scientific American's associate books editor!

12/10/2025

We are OVER THE MOON to announce our new partnership with the Whiting Foundation—and to celebrate the 10 incredible writers chosen to receive the 2025 Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress! Each will receive $40,000 to support the completion of their books, which span memoir and scientific narrative, investigative journalism and biography. We’ll also be working with past, present, and future grantees through Book Publicity School to help them navigate today’s challenging media environment and get their books in front of as many readers as possible.

Here’s a Publishers Weekly piece about the winners and our publicity support:
https://bit.ly/4iVvswC

Without further ado, the 2025 Whiting Nonfiction Grant grantees:

—Paul Bogard, How to See the Sky: The Newest Science, the Oldest Questions, and Why They Matter for Life (HarperOne)
—Jason Cherkis, The Attempters: The Science and Struggle of Suicidality (Random House)
—S.C. Cornell, The Migrant and the Murderer: A True Story (Penguin Press)
—Caitlin Dickerson, Deported: The Hidden Toll of American Expulsion (Random House)
—Elena Dudum, They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful (One Signal / Simon & Schuster)
—Grace Elizabeth Hale, They Don't Own Us: Harlan County, Kentucky and the Past and Future of American Workers (Mariner Books)
—Will Harris, Need Is Need (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Both and Neither (Doubleday)
—Avi Steinberg, Grace Paley: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
—Raksha Vasudevan, Empires Between Us: Estrangement and Kinship Across Three Continents (Graywolf Press)

A giant congratulations to all the winners. We will be raising a glass to all of them this evening!

11/24/2025

One of the many things we’re grateful for right now: TWO of the 10 spots in the The Washington Post's Best Books of 2025 went to Press Shop PR clients! The Post called Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD “deeply researched and cinematic" and described Rachel Cockerell’s MELTING POINT as “electric, plunging readers into an intense, vivid, often contradictory set of observations, as if experiencing history as it unfolds.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/11/21/10-best-of-year-fiction-nonfiction/

Huge congratulations to both these smart, talented and lovely debut authors, and to the stellar teams at Simon & Schuster and Farrar, Straus and Giroux!

11/07/2025

As many of you know, Jane Friedman is the publishing industry's go-to expert about ... everything! I am thrilled to be speaking with her next week about how authors can build a personalized media list for themselves — it's vital in this overloaded, fractured, fast-moving, downright nutty media environment. The session will be based on Book Publicity School's Research and Rolodex Crash Course and it is FREE! It's Tuesday at noon ET and you can register here:

Today’s media landscape is fractured and fast changing. While this presents many new challenges to authors promoting their books, it also offers many new opportunities. In this session, Leah Paulos, founder and director of Press Shop PR and Book Publicity School, shares strategies and insights for...