PEN Workshop Series

Join us for a Members-only roundtable discussion over coffee and bagels and hear publishing professionals address topics relevant to your work.



“Innovate Publicity Now, or Buzz & How to Get It” with guest speakers Lauren Cerand, Katie Freeman & Lisa Vanterpool



From what you can do to assist your publisher in bringing your work to the broadest possible audience, to how your agent can help raise your profile among peers in publishing, to how an independent publicist works, we’ll cover it all with an inside perspective on what it takes to get the job done.



Check-in 8:30AM

Talk/Workshop: 9:00AM-10:00AM


The New School

66 W. 12th Street

5th floor, Room 510

New York City

The RSVP list for this event is now closed. 

This workshop will air live for PEN Members on Tuesday, December 16 from 9am-10am. 
This feed is also available through The New School’s Livestream Page.




Katie Freeman



Katie Freeman is Associate Director of Publicity at Riverhead Books, and has worked in the publicity departments of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Pantheon Books. She works with a diverse group of literary fiction and nonfiction authors including Tiphanie Yanique, Anne Lamott, Mohsin Hamid and Jess Row. She serves on the Brooklyn Book Festival’s Literary Council, the membership committee of PEN American Center, the advisory board of Archipelago Books, the Young Publishers Committee of Words Without Borders, and the AAP’s International Freedom to Publish Committee. A native Midwestern, she lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.



Lisa Vanterpool



Lisa Vanterpool is the Public Relations and Social Media strategist at InkWell Management, where she coaches clients on their online branding strategy and liaises with publishers to creatively collaborate on book publicity. She began her publishing career in London where she studied for her M.A. in Publishing at Kingston University while working at the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency. She’s been working in agencies ever since. Prior to her career in publishing, she earned her B.A. in Communications from Old Dominion University and worked in event coordination and management. A lover of travel memoirs and contemporary non-fiction, she enjoys jazz on quiet mornings & French lessons.



Lauren Cerand



“There are publicists, and then there is Lauren Cerand,” said Flavorwire, counting her among “35 Writers Who Run the Literary Internet.” She has been called one of the “cultural gatekeepers in the literary world” by Time Out New York, and among the “Best of New York” by The Village Voice. According to The Nervous Breakdown, “Lauren Cerand is a singular powerhouse of vision and personality… there isn’t a hotter freelance publicist in the country.” She is known “as a freelancer of exquisite taste who only takes on projects that interest her,” says The Millions, “a social media pioneer,” says Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish Daily Paper), and a “specialist in literary social networking,” says The Telegraph (UK). According to The Rumpus, Lauren is “in that rare category of people in publishing who are both arbiters of taste and a kind of ‘brand’ in and of themselves.”