Starting September 20, Kevin Lewis will join Disney Book Group’s Disney-Hyperion Books as executive editor, where he will acquire and edit picture books, as well as middle-grade and young adult novels. He will report to Stephanie Owens Lurie, editorial director at Disney-Hyperion. Lewis was previously editorial director at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (Lurie hired him when he joined S&S in 1997); there, he worked with authors and illustrators including Laurie Halse Anderson, Tony DiTerlizzi, Holly Black, Kadir Nelson, Cynthia Rylant, Ntozake Shange, and Lauren Thompson. Prior to S&S, Lewis worked at the Blue Sky Press imprint at Scholastic, Scholastic’s SeeSaw Book Club, and Books of Wonder, the children’s bookstore in New York City.
Melville House has added several staffers. Christopher King is the publisher’s new art director. King was previously a designer at St. Martin’s Press and at Doubleday. Jason Bennett has been named director of publicity. Bennett previously worked at Hachette, where he was the assistant library marketing manager. Nathan Ihara has been named publicist. Ihara, who writes regularly for LA Weekly, was most recently eBook editor at Barnesandnoble.com. And, joining the company as director of marketing, is Siddhartha Lokanandi, who previously worked in marketing at Verso Books.
Karen R. Tiesling has been named product manager for the Élan Book software system at Media Services Group. Tiesling was most recently executive v-p of sales for Klopotek North America/Global Turnkey Systems, where she handled all sales and marketing efforts.
