Writers in Camden: Publishers Panel

Our annual Publishers Panel returns, featuring an editor, publisher, agent, and bookseller who discuss what it takes to bring a book from final draft to bookshelf. 

This program takes place in Penn 401, within the Paul Robeson Library. Enter from the quad and take the elevator to the 4th floor. 

Register for this program. 

Anjali Singh is an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary. In her twenty plus years in publishing, she has worked as a literary scout, as an editor at Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Simon & Schuster, and as Editorial Director at Other Press. Among the authors she has worked with are Marjane Satrapi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nadeem Aslam, Preeta Samarasan, Samantha Hunt, Brigid Pasulka and Saleem Haddad. As a literary agent, she is looking for new voices, character-driven fiction or non-fiction works that reflect an engagement with the world around us, memoirs, MG and YA literature and graphic novels for all ages. 

Richard Nash is a strategist, consultant and serial entrepreneur in new and traditional media. He led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up Small Demons and the new media app Byliner. Previously he ran independent publishers Soft Skull Press, and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, NBCC finalist for criticism Lynne Tillman, PEN Bingham winner Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen, Man Booker International Finalist Alain Mabanckou, Pulitzer finalist Lydia Millet, Jonathan Evison, poet CAConrad and many others, for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. In 2010 the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and in 2013 the Frankfurt Book Fair picked him as one of the Five Most Inspiring People in Digital Publishing. Last year he founded a shared US publishing office for five of the world’s leading independent publishers and this year he launched a book-and-wine subscription box called Rapt. He is completing his certification as an executive coach. 

Steven Burns is the Project Director of APIARY Magazine, an annual Philly-centric literary magazine and nonprofit working to amplify the voices of writers of all ages, backgrounds, and expertise. APIARY X, which is supported by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and Temple University’s Velocity Fund, will be published this April. Steve earned an MFA from Rutgers-Camden in 2015 and currently teaches 8th Grade English at Voorhees Middle School. 

Ashley Montague has owned the Penn Book Center since 2005. Before that she worked as a teacher and in non-profit outreach.