BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//InvisionCommunity Events 5.0.18//EN METHOD:PUBLISH CALSCALE:GREGORIAN REFRESH-INTERVAL:PT15M X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT15M X-WR-CALNAME:RMCommunityCalendar NAME:RMCommunityCalendar BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London TZURL:https://tzurl.org/zoneinfo/Europe/London X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20210328T020000Z RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20211031T020000Z RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:audiobook narration styles future 07/19/2021 DTSTAMP:20250526T211910Z SEQUENCE:0 UID:309-7-c3fe8195a3dde498d013e477e2142422@aalbc.com ORGANIZER;CN="richardmurray":noreply@aalbc.com DESCRIPTION:\n  audiobook narration styles future 07/19/2021\n\n\n\n   \n\n\n\n \n\n “I Probably Modeled Him on Something I’d Heard on The Wire”\n\n The audiobook industry is collectively squirming through the c ultural debate on representation and casting.\n\n BY LAURA MILLER\n\n Twen ty years ago\, Grover Gardner began narrating a series of comic mysteries whose title character is a white lawyer named Andy Carpenter. In the serie s—written by David Rosenfelt—Carpenter also has a partner\, Willie Mil ler\, who’s a Black ex-con\, which means Gardner had to voice Miller too . Back then\, he hardly gave any thought to the fact that he was a white n arrator voicing a Black man. “I probably modeled him on something I’d heard on television\, on Hill Street Blues\, or The Wire\,” Gardner said . Today\, 14 books later\, he’s still voicing Willie—but he’s change d his approach. “I’d think very hard about doing that kind of accent n ow\,” he said.\n\n In an era of heightened sensitivity to issues of repr esentation and misrepresentation\, it’s no longer acceptable to cast a w hite actor as a character of color in a movie or TV show. But audiobooks p lay by different rules. It’s customary now in the audiobook business to try to match a book’s narrator to the gender\, race\, and sometimes sexu al orientation of a novel’s author or main character. Yet most novels fe ature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds\, and this ca n require narrators to voice characters with identities very different fro m their own.\n\n When audiobooks first rose to popularity in 1980s\, the f ield was overwhelmingly white. Gardner\, who has been an audiobook narrato r for four decades and also works as a producer\, recalls that\, for the f irst couple of decades of his career\, “the whole industry was geared to ward middle-aged white businessmen” who listened to “books on tape” while on the road for work. There were hardly any narrators of color\, and few female narrators back then\, Gardner said. “I recorded Scott Turo w’s [1990 novel] Burden of Proof. The narrator of that book is a Latino lawyer\,” he told me. “I did it. We did whatever they sent us back the n. But I wouldn’t do that book today. You would find a Latino narrator t o do it.”\n\n Apart from the amused response to the cartoonish accents R onan Farrow rolled out when narrating the audio version of his 2019 expos é Catch and Kill\, the audiobook world has so far been largely free of th e sort of scandals that have triggered reckonings about representation in other creative industries\, like magazine publishing and television. This is partly because it’s a low-profile\, unglamorous field that doesn’t attract a lot of attention from the press. But many who work in the indust ry still feel the tensions around casting acutely. Amid a publishing boom in literature by writers of color\, nonwhite narrators are being offered m ore work than they once were. Meanwhile\, like most narrators\, they find themselves getting asked to voice marginalized characters from backgrounds that bear no resemblance to theirs. January LaVoy\, a biracial narrator w ho identifies as Black\, said that cross-cultural audiobook narration is f reighted in different ways for white narrators and narrators of color. “ For many white narrators\, it’s difficult because of fear [of backlash]. For many narrators of color\, it’s difficult because of the weight of r esponsibility.” The industry is grappling with these issues daily. “ It’s difficult for everyone\,” LaVoy said.\n\n Although some publisher s have audiobook divisions\, they usually function separately from the pri nt division\, and the audio rights for many titles get sold to separate co mpanies such as Brilliance or Blackstone. The producer of an audiobook\, w ho is employed by the publisher\, acquires the rights and oversees casting and other big-picture decisions\, such as opting for multiple narrators o n a novel that often switches points of view.\n\n Michele Cobb\, a produce r and the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association\, told me that she and her colleagues have tried to figure out how they can sensiti vely ask narrators to provide producers with information about their backg rounds—such as gender identity\, sexual orientation\, and disability—t hat can be helpful when casting. Cobb explained that it’s an ongoing cha llenge to cast appropriate narrators for books by authors of color\, while avoiding typecasting. In her own company\, which publishes romance audiob ooks\, “I’ve definitely had authors come back and say\, ‘Well\, this character is white so I wouldn’t go with a Black narrator\,’ ” a ch oice she feels obliged to respect.\n\n Traditionally\, both a director and an engineer\, usually both freelancers\, work on the recording with the n arrator. Director Simone Barros outlined an exhausting list of tasks to me \, from making sure the narrator doesn’t skip or add words to researchin g accurate regional pronunciations and maintaining continuity. “You can get to the last page of the book\, and it will mention that a character ha d a German accent the whole time\,” said Barros\, speaks with the mile-a -minute lucidness of a person whose job is anticipating every contingency. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.*\n\n In the ca se of some first-person narrators\, such as the one in Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind\, an audiobook Barros directed\, the book is “written so much w ithin the perspective of the first person that the ethnicity of other char acters are specifically heard from the narrator’s perspective of them. M ore specifically in Antkind\, the author’s very point is this shifting\, mutable and even unreliable perspective\, to shine a light on how too oft en minority characters go unseen\, or only seen or heard through a bias ci pher.” But with a book written in the third person\, she and her narrato r will work up a full voice profile—a cache of recorded dialogue and bio graphical information—for each speaking character. That way\, if\, say\, a villain appears in a novel’s first few pages only to disappear for se veral chapters\, the narrator and director can remind themselves of what h e sounds like. Such profiles are particularly helpful with recurring chara cters in sequels and series\, which may be recorded years later.\n\n In th e past\, it was largely left up to the professionals behind the scenes to anticipate and head off any problems. Ten years ago\, it wasn’t uncommon for a book’s author—the person most intimately acquainted with a ti tle—to have no input at all in the audiobook production. But as audioboo ks became a more mainstream and high-profile format\, authors began seekin g more oversight. Today\, writers often get the final say on casting\, and are often invited to choose a narrator from a selection of sample recordi ngs and encouraged to provide crucial information about how characters oug ht to sound. Nathan Harris\, a Black writer whose debut novel\, The Sweetn ess of Water\, is set at the end of the Civil War\, knew the accents of hi s multiracial cast of characters\, who include freed slaves\, would be a c hallenge. “You can go down a very precarious road with how they sound\ ,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to do it myself.” His publ isher presented him with an audition recording by William DeMeritt. “The y told me they could go in all sorts of different directions if that’s w hat I wanted\,” Harris said. “But he just nailed it.”\n\n Over the p ast few years\, the crew of professionals who work on a given book has inc reasingly been whittled down to a bare minimum\, putting greater pressure on narrators’ judgment—even though a narrator\, who is in most cases a freelance contractor\, doesn’t have much time to carefully screen a boo k for potential stumbling blocks before agreeing to the job. The exploding demand for audiobooks with the advent of digital downloads and\, most rec ently\, an increasing number of home studios built during the pandemic als o means that more narrators have ended up doing most of the production wor k and key decision-making on their own.\n\n Some narrators say they now tu rn down jobs when they feel unsure about voicing major characters. Cassand ra Campbell—narrator of\, among other things\, Delia Owens’ bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing\, a novel featuring several Black supporting char acters—recalled narrating the first two in a series of books\, which mad e her the automatic choice for the third. But when she discovered that the third book was told from the point of view of a young Burmese boy\, Campb ell\, who is white\, bowed out. “I just didn’t feel comfortable with it\,” she said.\n\n A multitude of minor characters can turn an audio b ook into a minefield for its narrator. Edoardo Ballerini\, who was profile d in the New York Times Magazine last year as “a go-to voice for intelli gent\, subtle but gripping narrations of books\,” says he’s now most o ften asked to narrate books requiring European accents. (His father is an Italian poet\, and he was raised in New York.) Still\, challenges do arise . “Take a James Patterson book\,” he explained. “Let’s say it’s set in New York City and the detective is hard-boiled\, an Italian-America n. I can do that. His partner is a feisty woman and I think I can handle t hat.” But then the minor characters start showing up\, sometimes slotted into uncomfortably stereotypical roles: “They get in a cab and there’ s the cabbie\, or they run into a perp who happens to be Black\, or whatev er it is. You have to voice them as well. And there’s really no way for anyone to say\, ‘Well\, I’m not going to do this book because there ar e a handful of lines by an Indian cabbie.’ ”\n\n Meanwhile\, many narr ators of color—extra-conscious of the weight of representation—find th emselves engaging in a lot of extra\, unpaid work researching characters a nd voices that they may ultimately decide they can’t do justice to. Rece ntly\, LaVoy bowed out on a title in a children’s series she narrates ab out a group of middle school students who travel the world with their ecce ntric professor\, encountering mythical creatures from the cultures they v isit. “When we did one that took place in the Pacific Northwest\,” she said\, “we got a Native American linguist from the Muckleshoot tribe to work with me. I felt really comfortable\,” she said. “But this one pa rticular book took place in Cuba\, and it was very heavily written in Span ish\,” a language LaVoy doesn’t speak fluently. When she got to a part where the whole group begins singing the Cuban national anthem\, she deci ded to pass. “They needed someone with a different mouth\,” she conclu ded.\n\n A character’s accent can be an evocation of her origins and ide ntity\, but it can also be—as was the case with Apu\, the Indian-born co nvenience-store clerk on The Simpsons\, voiced by white actor Hank Azari a—a mocking caricature. (Azaria recently announced that he would no long er voice Apu and expressed a desire to “go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize.”) “Actors love to do acce nts!” Campbell told me. “It’s fun to do vocal gymnastics\, but we ha ve had a moment of recognizing that there are certain accents where you’ re appropriating someone’s culture.”\n\n The one motto that nearly eve ry audiobook professional I interviewed repeated to me when I asked about their strategies for dealing with accents is “less is more.” Kevin R. Free—a Black theater actor who began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago a nd has become the voice of both a soap opera–addicted cyborg in Martha W ells’ Murderbot series and of Eric Carle’s iconic picture books (The V ery Hungry Caterpillar\, etc.)—laughingly recalled reporting for his ver y first recording session armed with a set of theatrically bold character voices\, only to be told by his director: “I don’t want you to think o f doing this book as doing a solo show. … There’s no reason for you to go all the way there.”* That holds especially true for cross-cultural a ccents. If Ballerini feels that “maybe I’m not the right person to giv e a voice to this particular character\, let me just do it as plainly and as simply as I can. I think that’s a general trend that’s happening in the industry.”\n\n Campbell explained that when voicing characters of c olor\, she uses an acting technique that focuses on the character’s inte ntions rather than on more superficial markers of identity like accent. “What does the character want from the other person in the scene? What i s the conflict of the scene? Play that fully without relying on cultural s tereotypes.” In Campbell’s recording of Where the Crawdads Sing\, she audibly dials the rural North Carolina accents of the Black characters fur ther down than the accents of the white characters they interact with.\n\n Sometimes\, however\, an accent shouldn’t be underplayed\, because it s erves a crucial role in the story. That can create conflict with the produ ction or postproduction staff\, if they’re not familiar with or sensitiv e to the cultural context of a book. Barros directed the audiobook of Simo n Han’s 2020 novel Nights When Nothing Happened\, about a family of Chin ese immigrants living in Texas. The wife in the book becomes annoyed when her husband leaves an outgoing message on their answering machine pronounc ing the family’s surname as “Chang\,” as the Texans around them say it\, rather than using the Mandarin pronunciation\, which is closer to “ Cheng.” When narrator James Chen’s recording went through a postproduc tion process called quality control\, or QC\, Barros and Chen received ord ers for “pickups” (short rerecordings edited into the final audiobook to correct errors) on every instance of the family’s name\, instructing them to pronounce it the Anglicized way—as the Texans do. This was\, as Barros put it\, “not only totally wrong\,” but a literal replication o f the assimilation that so bothers the main character’s wife. In that in stance\, the producer backed Barros and her narrator\, but that’s not al ways the case\; January LaVoy wincingly recalled the time that\, at a dire ctor’s insistence\, she recorded pickups replacing her correct pronuncia tion of Latinx with latinks.\n\n Deciding whether to use the Anglicized or loanword pronunciations can be fraught for bilingual performers. Emily Wo o Zeller\, a Chinese American narrator\, has sometimes clashed with direct ors and QC over whether to Anglicize the pronunciation of words taken from other languages\, such as tofu or kung fu. She is also one of the few nar rators I spoke with who took the step of contacting the author of a book t hat she found objectionable. “I won’t name names\,” she told me\, “but it was a white author\,” and the scene involved what Zeller cal led “misplaced comedy\,” in which the author “mixed up Chinese and J apanese culture\, and the comedy was about the way characters looked and t he fact that wanted to do kung fu and they were Communists.” Deciding “this can’t come out of my mouth\,” Zeller brought her concerns to t he author\, who\, she said\, was “very apologetic and willing to change it.”\n\n  Hers was an unusual move. Audiobook narrators tend to see the ir role as strictly interpretative. Their job is to convey the book from t he author to the reader in a way that remains true to the author’s inten t. This includes texts like classics\, books whose authors can’t be appe aled to for changes\, and books that contain words\, passages\, and charac ters that are now deemed offensive. There also remain plenty of contempora ry authors who\, as Cobb tactfully put it\, “haven’t caught up yet\, ” and narrators will continue to have to figure out how to perform those books.\n\n For Grover Gardner\, four decades in the audiobook industry ha ve taught him that “where there’s ignorance\, you fall back on the onl y things that you’ve seen or heard\, and chances are very good that\, if you’re an older person\, you’re drawing on a stereotype.” He’s ha d to work to transform some of his ongoing roles from vocal clichés into full characters. In the case of the former convict Willie in the Andy Carp enter mysteries\, for instance\, he has consciously tried to lean less on an exaggerated accent as an actorly crutch. “I’ve tried to focus more on attitude\,” Gardner said\, “on the real person.”\n\n\n\n Correcti on\, June 23\, 2021: This article originally misstated that Simone Barros is Black. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.\n\n U pdate\, June 23\, 2021: This article has been updated to add additional co mments by Barros about the narration and perspective in Antkind.\n\n Corre ction\, June 22\, 2021: This article originally misstated that Kevin R. Fr ee began narrating audiobooks five years ago. Free began narrating audiobo oks 20 years ago.\n\n\n\n ARTICLE\n\n https://slate.com/culture/2021/06/au diobook-narration-race-accents-casting-racism-representation.html?utm_sour ce=Sailthru&\;utm_medium=email&\;utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20J une%2022%2C%202021&\;utm_term=lithub_master_list\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n How S tories Change When They Move From Page to Voice\n\n Laura Lindstedt on the Different Ways We Read a Book\n\n By Laura Lindstedt\, translated by Davi d Hackston\n\n June 14\, 2021\n\n\n\n To all intents and purposes\, a psyc hoanalyst’s couch is in fact a bed—after all\, it lacks a back and arm rests. And yet\, this item of furniture must be called a couch. Nobody wou ld offload their traumas on a psychoanalyst’s bed unless\, that is\, the y were in a relationship with said psychoanalyst.\n\n\n\n In October 2019\ , I found myself sitting in the Silencio recording studios\, headphones ov er my ears\, reading aloud my novel My Friend Natalia\, which had been pub lished in Finland six months earlier.\n\n\n\n “‘Natalia’ was one of my first clients to lie on her back without prompting\,” I read and cont inued: “When I showed her round my office\, which I had rented in an apa rtment next to my house\, I told her about the couch.”\n\n These two con secutive sentences are from the opening chapter of the novel. Reading thes e sentences aloud irrevocably sprained something in my brain.\n\n\n\n When one reads a book aloud as an audiobook\, the visual aspects of the text a ll disappear. Of course\, one could read the word couch\, which appears in italics\, in a slightly different way\, perhaps by holding a short\, arti stic pause before the word. But this is not the same thing. Italics are no t the same as a short pause.\n\n\n\n The therapist\, the book’s narrator \, gives the patient the code-name “Natalia.” Under the cover of this anonymity\, the therapist then proceeds to divulge intimate details of Nat alia’s life to the reader\, then at one point removes the inverted comma s from Natalia’s name “as I might remove the safety catch from a gun ”. When read aloud\, this sentence is absurd: the listener cannot hear t he inverted commas around Natalia’s name.\n\n\n\n *\n\n\n\n Let’s be c lear: I am very skeptical about the practice of turning works of literatur e into audio recordings.\n\n\n\n If audiobooks become the primary way in w hich we interact with books\, it would be strange if at some point this di d not have a direct impact on how people write literary works.\n\n Will wr iters—either consciously or subconsciously—start writing books so that they sound good when read aloud? The succinct speech between Me (the writ er) and You (the reader) works well when spoken aloud\, so the current app etite for autofiction is unlikely to dwindle any time soon. A linear narra tive\, in which we already know (or think we know) something about the end point\, is also easy to listen to. For this reason\, celebrity autobiogra phies and so-called true stories make for successful audiobooks.\n\n Howev er\, complex narrative structures\, shifting perspectives\, narrative poly phony\, long\, meandering sentences and the visual aspects of a text find themselves increasingly under threat from a medium that relies solely on h earing. If linear narrative becomes the only acceptable form of complex li terary expression\, our thoughts will be the poorer for it. Imaginary worl ds and possibilities will shrink because such worlds and possibilities are not “content” that can be detached from “form\,” they are not sta tements\, suggestions or questions isolated from their rhetorical devices. \n\n\n\n *\n\n\n\n That being said\, I’m not a militant opponent of audi obooks. To my mind\, it is simply important to recognize that there is a s ignificant difference between the printed book and the audiobook. Written material turns into vibration\, letters become sound waves. They always co me from a concrete source that guides our interpretation\, a source that i s completely different from the reading process heard through our “inner voice.”\n\n\n\n A new element appears between the book and its recipien t: a voice that shapes how we receive the text. It is a sound born of a hu man body in a unique way and that is (generally) readily identifiable as t he voice of a man or a woman.\n\n\n\n In the audiobook of My Friend Natali a\, this unavoidable fact becomes a poetic problem in its own right. Throu ghout the text\, I have scattered conflicting clues as to the sex of the t herapist\, the novel’s first-person narrator\, but I was careful never t o define the therapist as either a man or a woman. With certain exceptions \, in many languages a writer and a translator can easily disguise or at l east avoid the matter of the narrator’s sex. A writer can also play with this ambiguity\, as is the case in my novel My Friend Natalia.\n\n Some r eaders have been convinced that the narrator is a man\, others have consid ered the therapist a woman. Several readers have told me that their percep tion of the matter changed as they were reading. Readers always read a tex t through the prism of their own experiences\, preconceptions and cultural stereotypes.\n\n For this reason\, I wanted to read the Finnish audiobook of My Friend Natalia myself. I am a woman\, but because I am the book’s author my voice is above all an authorial voice\, and in this way I feel I managed to resolve the dilemma described above.\n\n\n\n But my relief wa s somewhat premature. I was once again forced to confront this matter in e arly 2021 when Penguin Random House Audio began to produce the English-lan guage audiobook of David Hackston’s translation of My Friend Natalia (W. W. Norton/Liveright).\n\n\n\n PHR Audio’s producer kindly sent me a numb er of audio samples to listen to. All these samples were very professional and of the highest quality\, but still they were unsuitable for my nove l’s narrator. I started to lose hope. Was it at all possible to find an actor whose voice was neither that of a man nor a woman\, a voice that was n’t too young as it should be a voice that conveys the therapist’s wea lth of professional experience? The voice also needed dash of pompous embi tterment\, stemming from the fact that nobody seems to value the therapist ’s subtle genius.\n\n\n\n But we were lucky\, and eventually we found an excellent voice\, that of the actor TL Thompson\, who identifies as non-b inary and whom I chose as the English-language reader for My Friend Natali a.\n\n\n\n Thompson’s voice is characterful\, mesmerizing and unforced. To my own ear\, Thompson’s voice sounds more masculine than feminine\, o r perhaps it’s the whisky baritone of an elderly lady. However\, the voi ce is not remotely “gender-neutral\,” a voice-type that we tried to lo ok for at first and whose very existence I have seriously begun to doubt. Thompson’s voice made every sentence oscillate between the two. I have n ot written such oscillation into my novel\, let alone a gender-neutral nar rator’s voice: the question of the therapist’s identity opens up—if\ , indeed\, it opens up at all—when readers find themselves indulging in assumptions that the text does not affirm.\n\n\n\n I can say quite whole-h eartedly that I love Thompson’s reading. Yet in the same breath\, I must reiterate what I have already said: an audiobook is a different entity fr om a printed book.\n\n\n\n *\n\n\n\n For me\, the act of interpretation is specifically that of thinking with the book. It requires stops\, pauses\, flicking through the pages\, making notes in the margins. The book takes on markings\, layers that are missing from digital products\, which are pe rpetually new.\n\n We can browse with our eyes but not with our ears\, as my partner\, who works with sound\, would put it. The ear is more sensitiv e to chaos and clamor than the eye. Sound operates like a one-directional timeline\, a surge that is hard to control. A detailed auditive perception of a large space is simply impossible.\n\n\n\n It is to these very layers that I return when trying to form an understanding of the kind of book I am reading. I can easily locate markings I have made by flicking through a book\, even if it is a book I read 20 years ago.\n\n\n\n The various temp oral strata of my home library provide a shadow story of what has touched me and who I have been throughout my reading life. Last summer I awoke to the immeasurable value of these little scribblings when going through my g randmother’s estate after she died at the age of 100. From the collectio n of religious books\, treatises and notebooks\, I saved those in which my grandmother had left some kind of mark—and exclamation mark\, a line un der a section of text\, or a Biblical verse in the margin. These markings reveal not only what touched her and who she was\; they also say a lot abo ut where I have come from\, what kind of supra-generational reality I carr y with me.\n\n\n\n ARTICLE\n\n https://lithub.com/how-stories-change-when- they-move-from-page-to-voice/?utm_source=Sailthru&\;utm_medium=email&am p\;utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%2014%2C%202021&\;utm_term=lit hub_master_list\n\n \n\n\n\n New works from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives will finally be published\, starting next year.\n\n\n\n By Dan S heehan\n\n June 23\, 2021\, 11:21am\n\n\n\n The publishing giant HarperCol lins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr . to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s e ntire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historica lly important and vital literature in American history.”\n\n\n\n As repo rted by Publishers Weekly earlier today<\;  read below  >\; \, the m ega-deal gives HarperCollins world rights “to publish new books from the archives across all formats\, including children’s books\, e-books\, au diobooks\, journals\, and graphic novels in all languages.”\n\n\n\n Give n the significance of the books in question\, it seems strange that a deal like this one wasn’t made sooner\, but this is welcome news nonetheless .\n\n\n\n More welcome still is HC’s assertion that it will hire a dedic ated archivist to oversee the project\, and “engage prominent Black scho lars\, actors\, artists\, performers\, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.”\n\n\n\n Way back in 1958\, HC’s predecess or company Harper &\; Brothers published Dr. King’s very first book\, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story\, which detailed the 1955–5 6 Montgomery bus boycott and described the conditions of African Americans living in Alabama during the era.\n\n\n\n The first MLK titles to be publ ished by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022\, to coincide with Marti n Luther King Jr. Day.\n\n\n\n ARTICLE\n\n https://lithub.com/new-works-fr om-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-s-archives-will-finally-be-published-starting- next-year/\n\n\n\n  \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n HC Inks Deal with MLK Jr. Archives\ n\n By Rachel Deahl | Jun 23\, 2021\n\n\n\n In an agreement with the estat e of Dr. Martin Luther King\, Jr.\, HarperCollins has acquired world publi shing rights to the archives of the civil rights leader. The publisher sai d the collection features some of the \"most historically important and vi tal literature in American history.\"\n\n\n\n Judith Curr\, president and publisher of HarperOne Group\, negotiated the deal with Amy Berkower\, pre sident\, Writers House and agent for the King estate\; and Eric D. Tidwell of Intellectual Properties Management\, manager of the King estate. The d eal gives HC world rights to publish new books from the archives across al l formats\, including children’s books\, e-books\, audiobooks\, journals \, and graphic novels in all languages.\n\n HC said it plans to hire an ar chivist who will oversee the material in the archive and make it \"availab le to all HarperCollins editors globally.\" HC added that it intends to \" engage prominent Black scholars\, actors\, artists\, performers\, and soci al activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.\"\n\n\n\n HC also h as history with King. A predecessor company to HC\, Harper &\; Brothers \, published King's first book\, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Sto ry\, in 1958.\n\n\n\n All current his King titles\, including those publis hed by Beacon Press\, will continue to be publishing by their current righ ts holders.\n\n\n\n “We are thrilled to be the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives\,” said Curr in a statement. “We view this as a unique global publishing program.\"\n\n\n\n The first King titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022\, coinc iding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.\n\n\n\n ARTICLE\n\n https://www.pub lishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/86731-hc-in ks-deal-with-mlk-jr-archives.html\n\n  \n\n\n\n SOURCE ARTICLE\n\n Kobo E merging Writer Prize\, Books for Palestine\, and an Intro to Booktok: This Week in Book News\n\n https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/06/25/kobo-emergin g-writer-prize-books-for-palestine-and-an-intro-to-booktok-this-week-in-bo ok-news/\n\n\n\n Original Post\n\n\n\n https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-r ichardmurray/?status=1579&\;type=status\n\n\n\n  \n\n\n\n  \n\n DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20210719 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR