PRH’s LGBTQ Network Featured in PW; Igloo Interviews Network Co-Chair Nora Alice Demick
June 4, 2018
Coinciding with the beginning of Pride Month, Publisher’s Weekly featured a special section devoted to LGBTQ Publishing. The lead article, “Office Support: Pride Groups at Publishing Houses Bring Employees Together and Advocate for LGBTQ Books,” opened with a fabulous photo of the Penguin Random House LGBTQ Network. Nora Alice Demick, who co-chairs the network with Tan Chan, was quoted extensively throughout the piece.
Nora Alice Demick, who works in marketing at Riverhead, Viking, and Penguin Books, co-chairs the Penguin Random House LGBTQ Network with Tan Chan, a designer. They inherited the group from founder Emanuel Xavier, a poet, author, and activist who works in special markets at PRH. Xavier launched the network in 2011 on the heels of the company creating a video for the It Gets Better project, which supports bullied LGBTQ youths.
Demick and Chan took the lead in 2017, and one of their first changes was to add the Q to the group’s name. “We thought this would better represent the different orientations and gender identities that we have here at PRH, and we wanted people to know that we acknowledged their existence,” Demick says. “We want people, LGBTQ or otherwise, to know that we’re here. That was one of the biggest issues—no one knew that there was an LGBTQ network at PRH.”
In the past year, the network has expanded from brown bag lunches and happy hours to fundraising and volunteering. “We did a huge, successful bake sale for the Trinity Place Shelter, a homeless shelter for LGBTQ youth in Manhattan,” Demick says. “We sold out in an hour and had to go scrounge up croissants because we didn’t have anything else left to sell.”
About 150 employees have signed up for the group’s mailing list. The network will participate in New York’s Pride March again this year and is organizing book giveaways and panel discussions throughout June. Activities come to a head during Pride Month, but the group also pursues long-term projects, such as its crowdsourced bibliography of LGBTQ literature.
“To look back and see that we have all these titles by LGBTQ individuals—as a queer person, it’s empowering,” Demick says. “It makes me confident every single day walking into work.”
To read the complete PW article, click here. Feel free to spread the word on social media. A reminder: if you are posting to a personal or other non-PRH account you must include the hashtag #TeamPRH. Following the publication of this article, Igloo interviewed Nora Alice Demick. Read our Q&A with her below: What were your first reactions to seeing/reading how prominently the Penguin Random House LGBTQ Network was featured in the “Office Support” article as part of PW’s LGBTQ Publishing special section? At the risk of sounding thematic, definitely pride. An overwhelming sense of pride— and excitement, of course! There are many other organizations that are doing such important work and to be alongside them in the article is an honor. [caption id="attachment_114138" align="alignright" width="300"]

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