HONOREES
BENJAMIN ROSENTHAL
Executive editor
HarperCollins/Tegen, New York City
R
osenthal is the editor behind such books as Mindy
McGinnis’s Heroine, a look at the opioid epidemic, and
her Female of the Species, an examination of rape culture; as
well as Tiffany Jackson’s Allegedly and Monday’s Not
Coming, both tackling issues facing black teens. He also birthed a book
that his colleague, Mabel Hsu, reports “weighs almost as much as his
first-born child.” The book, Armand Balthazar’s painstakingly illus-
trated Timeless Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic, won glowing
reviews from PW and many others. Rosenthal is “someone who lifts
others up,” Hsu says. When she was hired as his assistant (now a col-
league), she heard that she was hired as
the team’s “token Asian,” and Rosenthal
was the first person she turned to. “POC
in this industry can’t survive without
true-to-the-bone allies, advocates, and
mentors—all of which Ben has proven
himself to be time and time again.”
NOËLLE SANTOS
Owner
The Lit. Bar, New York CityI
n 2016, the Bronx Barnes &
Noble, the only bookstore
serving the Bronx’s nearly 1.5
million people, shuttered its
doors. Noëlle Santos, a former execu-
tive at an IT firm, refused to let her
community live without a bookstore, so she decided to open one
herself—in spite of knowing almost nothing about the book
business. For funding, she turned to Indiegogo, where she dou-
bled her crowdfunding goal of $100,000. To learn the business,
she moonlighted at Housing Works, Greenlight, and Word Up
Community Bookshop while working full-time, and last
summer, Lit. Bar opened its doors. Santos’s unlikely success story
has won her extensive press coverage from the New York Times
and the Today show, and she won the BISG’s 2018 Industry
Innovator Award. She is an ABA advisory council member, the
coadministrator of the Indie Booksellers Q&A Facebook forum,
and a comoderator for PW’s BXsellers Facebook group.