In a world where authors must do their own promotion, the good news is that you have many tactics available. Even if you avoid social media and no matter how much support your publisher provides, there are ways that authors can raise their profile and find readers. Leslie-Ann Murray moderates a panel of authors who have taken various approaches to publicizing their books and connecting with audiences.

If you could use advice about how to approach social media or need help getting traction with reviews and interviews, join us for this encouraging talk about how writers can actively promote themselves and their works throughout the literary world, before and after a book’s publication. The session will offer practical strategies to:

• Secure book reviews and interviews (even with smaller, emerging platforms)
• Prepare for interviews and confidently own their narrative.
• Elevate their social media presence in authentic, sustainable ways.
• Connect with audiences through book clubs, newsletters, and literary communities.

A Q&A will follow the presentation; you can pre-submit a question when registering for the event. A recording will be made available for those who cannot attend live.

The event will take place via Zoom with automatic closed captioning. To request any other accessibility features, please email support@authorsguild.org and we will make every effort to accommodate.

Panelists

Dr. Camille U. Adams is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Camille is the author of the memoir, How To Be Unmothered: a Trinidadian memoir, released August 2025 with Restless Books. Camille also narrated the audiobook for the memoir, whereby the distinct poetic prose can be aurally enjoyed. How To Be Unmothered has since been recognised by Electric Literature’s Best of 2025 Nonfiction List and Camille has been invited to several national book fairs and panels to discuss the ground-breaking concept of unmothering. Her manuscript was recognised as a finalist in the Restless Books Prize in New Immigrant Writing 2023.

Camille earned her MFA in Poetry from City College, CUNY and a Ph.D. in Creative Nonfiction from FSU. She has been awarded Best of The Net – nonfiction 2024, has received five Pushcart Prize nominations and three Best of the Net nominations for her published CNF work in literary magazines. Her writing has also received recognition as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2022. Among Camille’s awarded fellowships is an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellowship, an inaugural Granta nature writing workshop fellowship, an inaugural Anaphora Arts Italy Writing Retreat Fellowship, a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a Community of Writers Fellowship, and a Roots Wounds Words Fellowship. Camille is also a Tin House alum and has received support from Kenyon Writers Workshop, VONA, and others.

She has led a generative writing workshop for a Tin House workshop and served as a juried reader for Tin House for two consecutive years. Camille has also happily contributed to the literary community as a CNF editor at Variant Lit, and as an assistant editor at Split Lip Magazine and at The Account. Camille’s memoir writing is featured in Passages North, Citron Review, XRAY Literary Magazine, Variant Literature, The Forge Literary Magazine, Kweli Magazine, and elsewhere. She currently lives in NYC where she teaches and is hard at work on book two.

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was named in Newcity’s 2025 Lit 50 list, recognizing influential people and organizations shaping Chicago’s literary culture. She was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan.

Samantha Paige Rosen’s writing on identity, culture, and the arts has appeared in the Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Slate, and elsewhere. She is the editor of the anthology Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, out in July with Beacon Press.

Leslie-Ann Murray is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago, and a citizen of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. She created Brown Girl Book Lover, a social media platform where she interviews diverse writers and reviews books that should be at the forefront of our imagination. Leslie-Ann is working on her first nonfiction essay collection, This Has Made Us Beautiful, about incarceration, race, immigration, education, and the overwhelming impact of these political forces on herself, the boys and men in her life, and the women in her community. She has been published in Poets & Writers, Zone 3, Ploughshares, Blackbird Journal, Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, The Audacity, and Salamander Literary Magazine.

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