Joanna Cotler.

Cotler, whose title is senior v-p and publisher, is leaving to focus on her sideline passion, painting. She will continue to edit select titles after her departure; moving forward these will be the only titles published under the Joanna Cotler Books banner. The imprint currently issues 15 titles a year; it has not yet been determined how many books Cotler will do once she transitions to editor-at-large.

Of the two editors who worked with Cotler at the imprint, one, associate editor Alyson Day, is staying at HarperCollins while the other, senior editor Karen Nagel, is leaving. Day, who will be handling day-to-day business for the imprint, will be moving to another editorial group at the company. (It has not been worked out who will oversee the imprint's current and forthcoming titles.)

Over the years Cotler has worked with a distinguished list of authors, including William Steig, Art Spiegelman, Sharon Creech, Francesca Lia Block and Jamie Lee Curtis. In thanking her colleagues at HarperCollins, Cotler added that she was "most deeply honored by the authors and artists who chose to work with me. I love them all and have been so privileged to publish their books." —Rachel Deahl

Alexie at the Think Future panel. Credit: Leslie Jean-Bart.

During a wide-ranging conversation, panelists discussed various issues involved in publishing for teen readers, including the limitations that designating a book as a YA can have in the market, and they addressed the tension between what teens want to read vs. what some adults find appropriate.

The genre called "YA" is a new one for novelist Alexie, who won the 2007 National Book Award for his first book for teens. Having already had a "really great career" in the adult world, he said that for him, the best part of writing YA novels is "seeing all these younger versions of myself and my characters" when he meets his readers. Also, Alexie believes, there’s a lot more at stake for teens, telling of a boy he’d recently met at an appearance who had Tourette’s Syndrome, and who asked him for advice on how to deal with bullies. "Adults are not going to stand up and ask me that question." he said.  

Author Sally Cook (Hey Batta Batta Swing!) had been volunteering with Project Sunshine for a year when she was asked by the nonprofit’s founder, Joseph M. Weilgus, to head up the program. During visits, authors and illustrators read from their books, discuss their writing/drawing processes and sign books for and take pictures with patients. Among the dozen authors who have signed on with the club are Brian Collier, Doreen Cronin, Sonia Manzano and Mary Pope Osborne. Publishers donate copies of the participants’ books to remain with patients once the author has left.
  

Originally written in 1942 as a short story entitled "Summer at the Sea" and rewritten as a novel in 1950, The Joys of Love is an old-fashioned coming-of-age/love story. It features an orphaned Smith College graduate, Elizabeth Jerrold, besotted with the theater, who lands an apprenticeship at a summer theater and falls in love with an arrogant young director. L’Engle was always forthcoming about how heavily her fiction drew on her own life, but this early work is perhaps the most directly autobiographical, according to Léna Roy, L’Engle’s granddaughter, who contributed a personal introduction to the book.

"Elizabeth was as close to an autobiographical portrait as you could get," Roy writes in her introduction. "Madeleine had spent two summers doing theatre in Nantucket and the setting for The Joys of Love is also at the ocean. Elizabeth, like Madeleine, went to Smith College and is impossibly well-read. Madeleine’s own father died when she was a teenager, and she describes Elizabeth repressing her grief, just as she had done."  

The company will publish two books by Alison Feigh, a child safety specialist with the Wetterling Foundation, and once a classmate of the kidnapped boy for whom the foundation is named. I Can Play It Safe is a picture book about personal safety, while the second book, On Those Runaway Days, provides children with coping strategies to use when they feel running away from home might be a solution to their problems.

"This furthers our mission," says Judy Galbraith, Free Spirit’s publisher, "and it furthers the Wetterling Foundation’s mission as well. We all want to make children safe, but we don’t want to scare them. These books are thoughtfully and responsibly written in tackling these topics."

Both hardcover books will retail for $14.95. I Can Play It Safe will be released with a 6,000-copy initial print run, On Those Runaway Days with a 4,000-copy initial print run.

In the spring of 1933, amid the darkest days of the Great Depression, the Viking Press made a well-considered leap of faith and launched its Junior Books division under May Massee. Viking was then an eight-year-old firm with a daring literary list, a dashing logo designed by Rockwell Kent, and a young visionary named Harold K. Guinzburg at its helm. The previous fall, after cutbacks at Doubleday had led to Massee’s dismissal there, Guinzburg had seized the chance to hire one of the masters of a specialized realm whose value was just beginning to dawn on publishers. At 50, Massee settled in to her custom-built mahogany-paneled office, where high on the wall her buoyant motto—"All things in moderation—even moderation"—was incised in Latin. Before long she had assembled a luminous roster of artists and writers that included Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, James Daugherty, Maud and Miska Petersham, Ludwig Bemelmans, Robert Lawson, Munro Leaf, William Pène du Bois, Kurt Wiese, Marjorie Flack, Ruth Sawyer, and Robert McCloskey. 

A former librarian and Booklist editor, Massee was the ultimate insider. Envious colleagues might joke that it was doubtless she who helped the New York Public Library’s Anne Carroll Moore count the ballots at Newbery-Caldecott time. No other editor of her generation published as many medal winners (four Caldecotts, nine Newberys)—or more classics that have stayed in print: The Story About Ping, Andy and the Lion, Make Way for Ducklings, the Madeline books, Roller Skates, Rabbit Hill . . . the list goes on.

As Massee followed her bliss, she fortified Viking’s financials. The Story of Ferdinand, which inspired a Disney short, a doll—and a ruckus among grown-ups sure it concealed a wicked commentary on the Spanish Civil War—gave best seller Gone with the Wind a run for its money. A few years later, Homer Price struck a popular chord as it reminded home-front Americans why the Allied war effort was worth making. Massee published Sweden’s Astrid Lindgren both because she knew Pippi Longstocking would sell and because she believed that American youngsters should know the best books the world had to offer.