SPI Day One: Passion, Power Editors, and Russian Poetry

Zinczenko and Leive at NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute

I’d wager there’s at least one kid in every city who dreams of making it big in New York. While a fair few aspire to Broadway stardom, our kind imagines something slightly more bookish, although undoubtedly as enchanting.

Our kind is the readers, the writers, and the would-be editors and publishers. We grew up checking out too many books from the library, using our allowances at Barnes & Noble, staying up way past midnight to read the new Harry Potter book, and just generally spending hours (possibly days) with our faces buried in text. While for some, this process may have manifested itself in a less-pronounced fashion, 116 of us applied and were accepted to the Summer Publishing Institute at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. At SPI, as we call it, we’ve now found ourselves eagerly immersed in one of the most intense summers of our lives. 

Social Media Success Story: 7 Students, 500,000 WBN books

M.S. in Publishing Students Peraza, Cox, Flavin, Olivares (back row), and Werthan, Narasimhan and George formed a social media committee for WBN.

To the literati of the world, April 23rd used to have special meaning as the day Shakespeare was born and Cervantes died. This year, the date took on even more significance as longtime book lovers and new readers alike participated in a nationwide movement that is likely to become as addictive as a juicy novel. On April 23rd, World Book Night (WBN) debuted in the U.S. after a successful launch last year in the United Kingdom. All over America, volunteers from all 50 states handed out books to non-readers and reluctant readers in an effort to promote literacy. “Givers,” selected through an application process online, passed  out 500,000 free paperbacks in churches, bars, children’s shelters, public transit systems and senior centers—even on beaches. (One innovative “giver” put copies of Patti Smith’s Just Kids inside Ziploc bags and doled them out in Monterey Bay.) Now, who better to promote this kind of national literary love fest than the students in the Master of Science in Publishing: Digital & Print Media program at NYU?