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Sara Nelson

Sara Nelson became editor in chief of Publishers Weekly in January 2005, straight from a stint as the Book Beat columnist for the New York Post. A journalist for twenty five years, Nelson had previously written a publishing column for the New York Observer and reviewed for publications from Glamour magazine to the Chicago Tribune. She was one of the founding editors of Inside.com. Her freelance pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many national magazines.

A native of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Nelson graduated from Yale, where she majored in Latin American Studies. She specialized in analyzing and translating the works of obscure, late Latin American poets, work she naively expected to continue when she arrived in New York after graduation. But while she did translate two novels ("Colombian Gold" and "The Imposters") and several poems for literary journals – and briefly considered a career as an agent, working with the Latin American literature specialist, Thomas Colchie – she was soon lured by the world of magazines. Her first staff job was as an editorial assistant at the Conde Nast startup, SELF magazine, her first published article was about running shoes.

Over the years, Nelson wrote and edited stories about everything from private schools to AIDS. She wrote celebrity profiles and book reviews and personal essays. In 2003, she published her memoir/reading guide, "So Many Books, So Little Time," which became a BookSense bestseller. 

In addition to her work as a journalist, Nelson has been a teacher at the Radcliffe Publishing Course, the NYU Summer Publishing Institute and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism; she has also worked in TV as a reporter/producer ("Top Cops" and "Women Aloud"). She has appeared regularly on radio and television networks and programs, including NPR, Air America, CNN, Entertainment Tonight, Today and Good Morning America.

Sara Nelson lives in New York City with her son, Charley.

 



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Sara Nelson

Recent Posts

The Fussy Man Feted

November 18, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

L. Rust Hills, the longtime Esquire magazine fiction editor  who died last summer, was the "nerve center" of the literary world for much of the last forty years.  Last Friday, he was honored at the New York Public Library in an event more than one attendee -- and this is not a crowd given to hyperbole -- called as epic, as competitive, as extravagant and maddening,  as the man himself.  I couldn't be there, but it seems everybody I know and admire was.  What follows is a letter from a friend of mine -- and more importantly, of Hills.   

In the gorgeous Jeffersonian trustees' room at the NYPL at the cocktail hour on a Friday night in November, 
L. Rust Hills was in
...Read More

Recent Posts

Book The Holiday

November 17, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

 

“To get pleasure out of Christmas shopping, begin early and make your selections gradually. It is quite time to begin now. There are no gifts so satisfactory and lasting as well-chosen books, and none so flattering to the taste and intelligence of the recipient.”

Reading these words, you might be forgiven for thinking they've come from the folks atIndieBound, who just this week launched a new ad campaign to get out the book vote this holiday season. Likewise, they might have been uttered by Carol Fitzgerald, whose Bookreporter.com (full disclosure: I was once her employee at an earlier incarnation of the site) is offering up special programs to inspire potential book-givers to buy. Or from Random House, whose new CEO, ...Read More



Recent Posts

Reading the Election

November 10, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

 

You don't have to be an Obama supporter, or even a Democrat, to have been inspired by the presidential election last week. The highest voter turnout on record, gracious concession and acceptance speeches, and the sheer joy expressed at Obama's victory, here and around the world, was enough to move all but the most cynical.

More than one pundit has remarked, in the postelection days, on a sense that the country and the world seem to have rediscovered optimism (pay no attention to that stock market).

Even the Eeyores of BookLand seemed buoyed. At several events I attended in New York last week, editors and publicists and booksellers remarked that despite the ongoing recession, they already felt better about the economy. “I think the holidays will be fine,” one prominent bookseller told me, articulating a pre-election theory that I had...Read More



Recent Posts

What word can you not spell?

November 4, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (6)

Last night, at the fifth annual Spelling Bee sponsored by the fine book-loving organization, Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), on whose board I sit, I got to test myself as a speller -- again.  I'm happy to report that I wasn't felled by any foreign words, as I have been in the past -- "hasenpfeffer," anyone?  How about "gnocchi"?  Does anybody even know what a "gi" is? -- and that I actually made it to the final round.  But dang, wouldn't you know it,  then I outsmarted myself and allowed that pesky brainy Brit, HarperCollins' Jonathan Burnham to beat me . . . .

I'm pretty proud of myself, as I was in some pretty illustrious company at the Diane Von Furstenburg studio last night.  Onetime poet laureate Billy Collins wasn't spelling this year (he has  in the past);  nor was James...Read More

Recent Posts

Book Abuse

November 3, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

 

Last week, amid disturbing news of layoffs and contractions at all kinds of media businesses—Reader's Digest, the Los Angeles Times and our own beloved Doubleday, among many, many others—the story that struck me was the one about the little book from tiny Tricycle Press that has become exhibit A in an ad campaign supporting Proposition 8 in California, which aims to overturn legalized gay marriage in the state.

King & King, a children's picture book by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, which was originally published in the Netherlands, is cited by a New England mother and father who were horrified that their son was exposed to the book—a kind of fairy tale in which a prince falls in love with a prince—at school. As PW's ...Read More





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