Levine Querido will launch Re-Lit, an imprint publishing reissues of out-of-print works by authors from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, this fall.
Arthur A. Levine, publisher of Levine Querido, explained in a release that he had founded his company in 2019 “with a mission to seek out and publish the brilliant work of authors and artists from communities that had been historically overlooked or underappreciated by the mainstream publishing community.” Noting that previously, “even when creators from marginalized communities did break through into publishing, they often faced problematic assumptions about how big a readership their work would reach, and how its value would be counted.”
Due to the ignorance and preconceptions that hampered the marketing of books by BIPOC authors at that time, Levine added, “Some of those books never reached the full audience they deserved. Many went out of print too quickly.” Editors at Re-Lit, Levine said, “will search for these buried treasures and do our very best to cast a new light that will allow them to sparkle once more.”
Re-Lit plans one release each publishing season beginning with Liberation Literature: Collected Writings of Virginia Hamilton, which will include the pioneering children’s author’s essays, speeches, and interviews originally published by Blue Sky in 2010 and edited by Hamilton's husband, Arnold Adoff, with Kacy Cook. The volume will feature a foreword by Laura Pegram, the founder and editor-in-chief of Kweli Journal, a publication that focuses on emerging BIPOC writers.
Hamilton, who died in 2002, wrote more than 40 books for young people. The first Black writer to win a Newbery Medal—for her 1975 novel, M.C. Higgins the Great—Hamilton received many other prestigious awards, including the Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King, National Book, Boston Globe/Horn Book, Children's Literature Legacy, and Hans Christian Andersen awards. She was also the first children's book author to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant, in 1995. The American Library Association established the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award in 2010 in her honor, recognizing a significant and lasting contribution by an African American author, illustrator, or author-illustrator to children's literature.
Re-Lit will follow up the Hamilton book in spring 2025 with the reissue of Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley, which was originally published by Algonquin Books in 1995 and went on to win the ALA’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award—now called the Stonewall Book Award—that year. The new edition will feature a foreword by Justin Torres. In fall 2025, the imprint will publish a new collection of poems by the late Paula Gunn Allen, best known as the author of The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), who was affiliated with the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico.
