When Michelle Herrera Mulligan joined Simon & Schuster as a senior editor in 2018, her aspirations were modest. Because her background was in media—she began her career in the 1990s working for Latina magazine and later served as founding editor-in-chief of Hearst’s Cosmo for Latinas—she was mostly just eager to familiarize herself with book publishing and see what she could contribute. “Frankly,” she says, “I didn’t have a plan.”

That changed two years ago, when the private equity firm KKR finalized its $1.6 billion purchase of S&S. KKR’s arrival brought a new “possibility for investment,” Herrera Mulligan recalls, so she and S&S CEO Jonathan Karp began thinking up ways the publisher could better reach the Latinx community. Herrera Mulligan was full of ideas, and eventually Karp suggested that S&S should simply launch a new Latinx-focused imprint—and Herrera Mulligan should run it.

“I was just sort of brainstorming with him,” she recalls. “I didn’t anticipate that it would turn into me with my own imprint!”

Soon enough, a plan emerged. Herrera Mulligan would serve as VP and associate publisher of Primero Sueño Press, an imprint under Atria Books named for her favorite poem by 17th-century nun and literary icon Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. A bilingual team was swiftly assembled, comprising Maria Mann, associate director of publicity and marketing; editor Yezanira Venecia; associate editor Norma Perez-Hernandez; and Selene Covarrubias, manager for international Spanish publishing and sales development at S&S, and the imprint officially launched in February 2024.

Later that year, Herrera Mulligan went on a fateful trip to the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), where she met with Urano World editor-in-chief Leonel Teti and CEO Joaquín Sabaté Pérez. There, an even more ambitious vision for the imprint came into focus. “They were really willing to build something with us,” Herrera Mulligan says of the team at Urano, one of the biggest independent publishers in Spain and Latin America.

Primero Sueño would go on to team with Urano to publish, market, and distribute select Primero Sueño titles internationally as co-branded editions—and it was in Guadalajara, Herrera Mulligan says, that “the seeds of the partnership became really clear.”

The extent of the joint publishing arrangement, which took effect this spring, is unique in that “this isn’t just some kind of back-end distribution situation,” she adds, noting that the two publishers consult on acquisitions and choose which titles to include in their collaboration, since some speak better to U.S. Latinx audiences while others have more international appeal. “We’re organically creating these publications together, and that to me is the coolest part of the partnership.”

Primero Sueño’s rapidly growing list is, in Herrera Mulligan’s words, “tailored to our community but not limited to our community.” Among the imprint’s first titles were Keila Shaheen’s The Shadow Work Journal, an originally self-published self-help title that Primero Sueño released in English and Spanish, as well as the memoir Detained: A Boy’s Journal of Survival and Resilience by D. Esperanza and Gerardo Iván Morales, another simultaneous English-Spanish publication, chronicling a Honduran child’s time in a detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border under the first Trump administration. One of its most recent titles is the new adult novel Follow My Voice by Ariana Godoy, translated by Frances Riddle, which originated on Wattpad, became a hit in Latin America and Spain, and now has an Amazon Prime film adaptation in the works. “I had a dream of bringing authors like this into English,” Herrera Mulligan says of Godoy, who is Venezuelan, “and to be able to be doing it is a big deal for us.”

This year, Herrera Mulligan, Yezanira Venecia, and Selene Covarrubias will return to FIL with a multi-pronged mission. First, they’ll be checking in with Urano to chart a course for the coming year. Second, they’ll be meeting with librarians with the aim of helping them build their Spanish-language collections. Third, they’ll be introducing some of their biggest upcoming titles, including the Spanish-language edition of Colleen Hoover’s 2015 novel Confess, which Primero Sueño will publish in partnership with Urano. (Confesiones is Urano’s first title by Hoover, and the publisher has a major rollout planned, including special editions with sprayed edges and distinct audiobooks for Latin America and for Spain.) And finally, they’ll be looking for new Spanish-language authors to “bring to the United States in a big way,” Herrera Mulligan says.

One of Venecia’s main goals at the fair is to expand her network of publishers, editors, agents, and translators across Latin America and Spain for this very purpose. At last year’s FIL, for instance, Venecia met Spanish author Sara Torres, whose novel The Seduction Primero Sueño is now planning to publish in Mara Faye Lethem’s English translation next summer.

“I’m always eager to learn what’s resonating with readers, what’s selling, and where those trends intersect—insights that help us bring exceptional translated works to Primero Sueño,” Venecia says. “We often hear the phrase ‘Latinos don’t read,’ but FIL is an incredible testament to the contrary.”

As Primero Sueño nears its second year, Herrera Mulligan has recalibrated her ambitions for the imprint, recognizing its potential to grow S&S’s Spanish-language footprint and to connect with Latinx readers at home and abroad. “I want the world for this imprint,” she says. “I want it all.”

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