Hachette Book Group has let go a number of staffers at Little, Brown, including VP and deputy publisher Craig Young and VP and executive editor Tracy Sherrod, along with Jean Garnett, Ben George, and Pronoy Sarkar, all senior editors. A representative at HBG confirmed a "restructure" and told PW that in all, "seven LB employees were affected in the changes." The rep said the move was "not a cost cutting measure" and that, "as part of the restructure, LB plans to hire new roles."

The layoffs comes after former editor-in-chief Judy Clain moved to Simon & Schuster to relaunch Summit Books in January and former Putnam VP and publisher Sally Kim joined the imprint as its president and publisher in February. It follows a separate round of layoffs at HBG last month, when the company laid off a number of staffers in its sales department.

More broadly, the job cuts follow the larger restructuring of Hachette Book Group and Hachette UK under a single “English-language management structure” led by CEO David Shelley, which began last year and led to the promotion of Carrie Bloxson to SVP of culture and diversity, equity, and inclusion across both groups last month.

Sherrod joined LB in May 2022, where she acquired fiction and nonfiction by Black writers, after a long tenure as VP and editorial director at HarperCollins’s Amistad imprint, the oldest imprint in New York trade publishing devoted to the Black book market. There, she succeeded Dawn Davis as editorial director in 2013, when Davis joined S&S to lead its 37 Ink imprint. (Davis left that imprint in 2020, to head up editorial at Bon Appétit, then returned last year.) Garnett joined LB in 2014, George in 2013, and Sarkar in 2021.

With the departure of Sherrod, the trade publishing industry has now seen three high-profile Black women depart from top positions since the big publishers made a public commitment to increase their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Lisa Lucas was dismissed from Pantheon Schocken last month after three years at the imprint, while Dana Canedy left her role as SVP and publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint in 2022, after two years.

This story has been updated with further information.