I’m presenting at Tech Forum for the third year in a row and this is going to be a powerhouse of a day!
In addition to my Fireside Chat with Ritu Bhasin, I will be on a panel with Annie Gibson (Publisher at Playwrights Canada Press), Scaachi Koul (Senior Writer at BuzzFeed), and Bhavna Chauhan (Senior Editor at Doubleday Canada). We’ll be leading an interactive session to fix all of publishing. Or at the very least fix the acquisitions process. I was loosely inspired by the process outlined in Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. We have 90 mins but same same, right?
The full panel description is below. Big thanks to the Literary Press Group for sponsoring this event, and to BookNet for giving me such wide berth to shape this session.
The “gatekeeping” framework of our industry is a major structural hurdle to diversity and inclusion in publishing. It is not enough to recognize our biases and stop doing harm (though that’s a key first step). We need to brainstorm ways to repair the historical damage done to our cultural institutions and artists. How do we shift from “gatekeeping” and towards what attendees of SFU’s 2018 Publishing Unbound conference called “spacemaking”: a process that solicits, supports, and develops the work of marginalized writers and professionals? In this dynamic, action-focused session, a team of industry professionals will lead attendees in a collaborative, generative process to develop “Best Practices” guidelines for industry adoption.
Supported by the Literary Press Group of Canada.
