Looking to increase diversity hiring in the book industry, the Association of American Publishers is partnering with the United Negro College Fund to provide paid internships to high-achieving students at Historically black colleges and universities.
The AAP/UNCF partnership will offer paid summer internships at a number of major publishing houses, among them Cengage, Elsevier, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, W.W. Norton and others. The program will fund a maximum of 10 paid internships for African American students who display strong leadership and writing skills and maintain at least a GPA of 3.0. In its first year the program will place students in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, and St. Louis.
The internships will be spread across the areas of editorial, marketing, publicity, sales and digital engineering. Juniors and seniors at any of the 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities can apply for the internships online by February 22 via the UNCF website or at Bookjobs.com, the AAP's book industry employment website.
Tina Jordan, v-p of the AAP, said “recruiting diverse talent is a top priority for publishers." She went on: "Attracting African American student interns to the publishing industry is an important step our member organizations are taking to expand workforce diversity and inclusion efforts.”
