The Association of American Publishers’ president and CEO Maria A. Pallante, left, speaks on a London Book Fair panel moderated by The Bookseller’s Philip Jones on April 18. With her are International Publishers Association president Karine Pansa and Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury and the UK’s Publishers Association. Pallante, in this week’s announcement, talks of the coming AAP annual general meeting as a chance to recognize ‘scholarship and public service’ in the program on May 8. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed Gives the Keynote Address
In announcing today (April 27) its plans for its annual general meeting on May 8, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) reports that Rep. Judy Chu, Democrat of California, will be the organization’s 2023 recipient of the AAP Distinguished Public Service Award.
Chu, the first Chinese-American woman elected to the United States Congress, has represented California’s 28th district since 2009. She sits on the influential Ways and Means Committee and the House Small Business Committee, while chairing the Congressional Asian-Pacific American Caucus and co-chairing the Congressional Creative Rights Caucus, the latter of which she co-founded.
The association’s key interest in selecting Chu lies in her work in copyright promotion and education. The association notes in its announcement that Chu “helped to establish the groundbreaking copyright claims board that’s now available for low-value copyright disputes, and supported legislative efforts to modernize the authority, governance, and operations of the Copyright Office.”
‘Two Extraordinary People’
Annette Gordon-Reed
The meeting’s keynote address on May 8 is to be given by Harvard’s Carl M. Loeb University law professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed, a winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (WW Norton, 2009).
Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth—a meld of memoir, family drama, and US history—was released by WW Norton’s Liveright in May 2021.
It became a “best book of the year” pick at media including the Washington Post, TIME, NPR, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Kansas City Independent.
Gordon-Reed, a native of Texas, is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and many more.
Pallante and Reidhead: Policy, Litigation
As Publishing Perspectives readers know, under the leadership of president and CEO Maria A. Pallante, the American association has become a leading force in promoting and protecting copyright protections. The organization is compiling a growing list of legal victories—most recently the profound finding for the AAP and its plaintiff-publishers in its three-year lawsuit of the Internet Archive and its “Open Library.”
Judy Chu
This ties closely into the intent behind the AAP’s Distinguished Public Service Award, which annually applauds “individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the public good by advancing laws or policies that respect the value, creation, and publication of original works of authorship.”
In speaking to the news of Chu’s and Gordon-Reed’s upcoming roles in the annual meeting, Pallante says, “How inspiring to celebrate professor Gordon-Reed and congresswoman Judy Chu at our annual meeting of members, two extraordinary people who have transformed society from their respective gifts of scholarship and public service. Their accomplishments remind us that stories matter, and that authors, publishers, and democracy are crucially intertwined.”
Also on the program is a discussion about challenges and opportunities in publishing’s higher education, scholarly, and trade sectors. That conversation is to feature:
- Julia A. Reidhead, CEO, chair, and president of WW Norton, and current chair of the Association of American Publishers
- Kumsal Bayazit, CEO of Elsevier
- Christie Henry, director of Princeton University Press
- Adrienne Vaughan, president of Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Pallante and Reidhead are to make reports on policy and litigation—obviously with much to discuss this year.
And Sergio Dahbar, who received the association’s International Freedom to Publish Award in September 2022 on behalf of the Venezuelan publishing house Editorial Dahbar, is to make a digital appearance.
The AAP annual meeting is to be held in a digital format on the 8th, and will be open to the association’s member houses and invited guests.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Association of American Publishers is here. More from us on the freedom of expression and freedom to publish is here, more on copyright and its issues is here, and more on the United States market is here.