Monday, December 1, 2008, 7:00 ­ 9:30 p.m.

The Secret Theater, 44-02 23rd St., Long Island City
www.secrettheatre.com
How do you maintain the momentum once you’re piece is published? A special panel of agents, publishers, and writers discusses what to do next.

Moderator
Marcela Landres, Editorial Consultant and author of the e-book How Editors Think
Marcela Landres is an editorial consultant who edits manuscripts, critiques proposals, and advises on how to launch and manage a writing career. She was formerly an editor at Simon & Schuster and is the creator of Latinidad, one of Writer's Digest magazine's 101 Best Web Sites for Writers.  A member of the Women's Media Group, she has acted as a judge for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and speaks frequently at writing conferences and literary events.

Panelists
Toni Plummer, Associate Editor at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press
Toni started at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press in 2004 and since then has enjoyed pursuing a range of commercial and literary fiction. Her special interests are women's fiction and crime fiction, especially mysteries. Her taste in mysteries runs the gamut: historical, private eye novels, police procedurals, cozies. In other fiction, she has acquired The Accidental Santera by Irete Lazo, a debut novel about a Latina scientist who enters the mysterious spiritual world of Santeria, as well as Daughters of the Stone by Bronx Council on the Arts Fellow Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, a poetic debut novel about a family of women spanning five generations and their journey from the sugar plantations of Puerto Rico to modern-day New York City. She is particularly interested in discovering new Latino authors and in books with multicultural themes.

Winfrida Mbewe, Publicity Manager for W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Winfrida is Publicity Manager at W.W. Norton where she has worked on a number of national bestseller titles including Bonk by Mary Roach and The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith.  Her latest publicity campaign included the 2008 National Book Award winner, The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed.  Mbewe serves on the Brooklyn Literary Council and has been featured in Publishers Weekly's "50 Under 40."

Margarita Shalina, Bookseller for St. Marks Bookstore

Margarita Shalina was born in Leningrad and raised on New York's Lower East Side. She has been the Small Press Buyer for St. Marks Bookshop for the past six years and was the store's Consignment Manager for seven. Outside of her role as buyer, she translates from Russian into English and reviews for Publisher's Weekly and Three Percent, the website that accompanies Open Letter Press.

Registration

Admission is free. Registration is required. Space is limited.
To register, please email your name, address, telephone number, and artistic discipline to mblouin@queenscouncilarts.org