Join us November 10, 2025, for the second webinar in the Ideas on Fire First Book Publishing Series, our six-part series for authors looking to publish their first books.
Acquisition editors from leading scholarly presses will share how to create a winning first book proposal by approaching it as a pitch process aligning your book with publisher goals.
The event is free and if you can’t make it live, you’ll still be able to watch the recording after.
When: November 10, 2025. 12:00 – 1:00 pm US Eastern (convert to your time zone)
Where: Zoom
Speakers
Sara Cohen
Editorial Director, University of Michigan Press
Sara Cohen is the editorial director at University of Michigan Press, where she handles acquisitions in music, dance, theater, and performance studies. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota and has been working in scholarly publishing since defending her dissertation in 2011.
Alyssa M. Napier
Acquisitions Editor, Columbia University Press
Alyssa M. Napier is the sociology and Black studies editor at Columbia University Press, where she acquires books that engage the subject of inequality from a range of domains and methodologies. She manages Columbia’s series Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past, Present, and Future, a partnership between Columbia and Howard University. Prior to her work at Columbia University Press, she worked at MIT Press.
Noah Springer
Acquisitions Editor, MIT Press
Noah J. Springer is the acquisitions editor for new media, digital humanities, game studies, HCI, and design at the MIT Press. He acquires books for the series Game Histories, Playful Thinking, and Platform Studies, among others. He also manages the Radium Age series, which is publishes forgotten science fiction classics from the public domain. Some of his notable acquisitions include Design for a Better World by Don Norman; Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath; From Pessimism to Promise by Payal Arora; and Building SimCity by Chaim Gingold. Noah holds a PhD in media studies from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Cathy Hannabach
CEO, Ideas on Fire
Cathy Hannabach is the founder and CEO of Ideas on Fire, where she helps interdisciplinary academics transform vibrant ideas into powerful books and public projects that can spark meaningful social change. Providing developmental editing, copyediting, manuscript reviews, and indexing since 2009, Ideas on Fire has become a catalyst for rethinking what scholarly publishing can accomplish in an ever-changing landscape.
