In the same week that Lee & Low’s diversity report in the US revealed that those identifying as Hispanic/Latino/Mexican fell to 4.6%, from 6% in both 2019 and 2015, Atria Books, part of Simon & Schuster, has announced a new imprint, Primero Sueño Press, dedicated to publishing Latinx/Latine/Hispanic authors in both English and Spanish.
Lee & Low is a New York publisher, founded 30 years ago, that publishes a quadrennial diversity report.
Primero Sueño will publish works of fiction and nonfiction “with universal appeal that honors and plays with genre” by authors from the United States and in translation from around the world.
Michelle Herrera Mulligan, who has been promoted to v-p and associate publisher at Atria, will lead the imprint, which is named after the poem of the same name by Juana Inés de la Cruz, “celebrating the soul’s search for absolute knowledge.”
The publisher says: ‘Government research shows that only 7% of authors and editors who publish books in the United States identify as Latino, in a country where 18% of the population—some 61 million people—consider themselves Hispanic,” Herrera Mulligan, who is bilingual, said in a statement. “Latine writers have been disrupting thought leadership behind the scenes for years. I’m beyond thrilled to showcase and project their voices in a major light and help bring them to new audiences.”
According to Publishers Weekly, overall the Lee and Low report found that the publishing industry has made incremental gains in broadening its workforce since the survey was introduced in 2015.
The survey’s top-line findings show that white people made up 72.5% of this year’s 8,644 respondents, down from 76% in 2019 and 79% in 2015. Those identifying as biracial/multiracial were the second largest group, at 8.3%—a significant increase over the 3% in 2019 who identified as biracial/multiracial. The percentage of respondents who were Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander/South Asian/Southeast Indian rose slightly, to almost 8%, from 7% in 2019. Black respondents held even at about 5% of the publishing workforce,
