About

Zando’s founder and leader is Molly Stern. Molly previously led Penguin Random House’s Crown as SVP & Publisher. At Crown, she launched Hogarth, a literary imprint conceived in collaboration with Chatto in the UK, which launched the bestselling, prize-winning work of Sally Rooney, Anthony Marra, Han Kang, and Herman Koch in the US. In partnership with actor and entrepreneur Sarah Jessica Parker, Molly launched the SJP for Hogarth imprint. Over the course of her career, Molly has published numerous literary prize-winners, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and nonfiction, as well as genre-defining bestsellers such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, Andy Weir’s The Martian, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming, the best-selling memoir of all time. Molly also serves on the board of The Opportunity Network, an organization combating the inequity in college opportunity and professional mobility that disproportionately affects students of color and those from low-income communities.

Emily Bell leads Zando’s editorial team and acquires a select list of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. Prior to joining Zando, Emily spent over a decade at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, most recently as an Executive Editor and the Director of the paperback original line, FSG Originals, where she published early works by such authors as Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey, and Laura van den Berg, and was responsible for a publishing partnership between FSG Originals and Logic magazine. She has edited and published bestselling and award-winning fiction and nonfiction, including Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League, Brian Phillips’s Impossible Owls, and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, selected as a New York Times Best Book of the Year for 2020. Prior to her tenure at FSG, Emily worked at Riverhead Books. Her acquisitions for Zando include Steve Almond’s All the Secrets of the World.

Andrew Rein joins Zando after thirteen years at Penguin Random House, where he most recently was Vice President, Director of Mass Merch National Accounts, including Walmart and Target, and was responsible for sales and strategy across over 100 imprints. He partnered with retailers on distinctive promotional models designed to maximize sales of bestselling authors such as Barack and Michelle Obama, John Grisham, and Chrissy Teigen, as well as publishing brands like Game of Thrones and Star Wars. He specializes in designing custom, high-impact approaches to book sales, marketing, promotion, and branding with national retail partners.

Dennis Lee joins Zando with over eighteen years of publishing experience, where he most recently was VP Finance, Strategy & Operations at HarperCollins. He assisted the company in the integration of HMH Books & Media into the HarperCollins ecosystem. Prior to Harper, he assisted the President of Books & Media at HMH to develop overall business strategy; managed the capital & financial planning process; provided financial business plans for building an Audio studio and created financial models in order to help the sales team negotiate financial and operational terms for large retail accounts such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Readerlink, and Ingram. Prior to joining HMH, he was Vice President of Business Management & Finance at Penguin Random House and also held positions at Simon & Schuster and Marvel Enterprises, Inc. Dennis received his MBA from CUNY Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business.

Prior to joining Zando, Nathalie Ramirez led brand partner marketing at Urban Outfitters, focusing on influencer-led storytelling to drive conversion for brands like Nike and Levi’s. Nathalie also spent time at Crown + Conquer, consulting for Beats by Dre on multiple activations geared towards Gen Z audiences, and at Paper Magazine, developing event and influencer programs for American Express, Target and Google. Nathalie is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course and started her career at Oxford University Press.

Chloe Texier-Rose began her career at Rubenstein Communications, one of the leading strategic communications firms in the country. At Rubenstein, Chloe worked on the team executing communications and publicity initiatives for the firm’s entertainment clients, including Paramount Pictures, HBO, TriBeCa Film Festival, Sony Pictures Entertainment, AMC, and Refinery29. After Rubenstein, Chloe held positions at HarperCollins, The Experiment, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she spent four years leading promotional campaigns for many of FSG’s bestselling and award-winning authors including Pulitzer Prize winner Eliza Griswold, Laura van den Berg, Sheila Heti, Jeff VanderMeer, James Ivory, Edouard Louis, Sarah Schulman, and New York Times bestsellers Tegan and Sara. She is a graduate of McGill University and was born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Prior to joining Zando, Sierra Stovall spent over a decade working in the rights departments of some of the most prominent publishing houses. Most recently, she worked for Sourcebooks where she ran the rights business across all adult and children’s imprints, negotiating international and domestic licenses for New York Times bestselling authors including Layla F. Saad, Kristina McMorris, Raj Haldar, and Marieke Nijkamp, as well as the #1 New York Times bestselling How to Catch series. There she also represented the company at the Frankfurt, London, Bologna, and Shanghai book fairs. Before joining Sourcebooks, Sierra worked at W. W. Norton, St. Martin’s Press, and Penguin Group where she had the honor of licensing rights for bestselling authors such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neil Gaiman, Nora Roberts, Rainbow Rowell, Louise Penny, Walter Mosley, Lisa Scottoline, and Brandon Sanderson.

Jessica Calagione started her career in publishing at The Wylie Agency, where she handled contracts ranging from permissions and serial agreements to major multi-book publishing agreements. Prior to joining Zando, she was part of the Business & Legal Affairs team at Anonymous Content, supporting the Media Rights group. Jessica is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Virginia School of Law.

Hayley Wagreich is the Director of Original Development, spearheading the launch of Zando Projects, a program focused on developing original books in collaboration with Zando’s publishing partners. Hayley was previously Head of Content at Realm, the #1 producer of scripted podcasts, where she oversaw show development for the studio, including the Webby-winning If I Go Missing The Witches Did It, Audie-winning The Haunting of Beatrix Greene, along with eight of the most downloaded fiction shows on Apple. Prior to that, Hayley was an editor at Alloy Entertainment and Disney Hyperion, where she shepherded multiple New York Times bestsellers and award-winners, including the National Book Award Finalist American Street, Printz Honor Code Name Verity, and #1 New York Times bestseller Max: Best Friend. Hero. Marine. During her career, she has also negotiated and overseen co-development deals of beloved entertainment brands, including Marvel, DC, Orphan Black, The Vampire Diaries, and the world of John Carpenter.

Tiffany Liao leads Zando’s Young Readers initiative, publishing MG and YA fiction and nonfiction, picture books, and graphic novels, with an emphasis on stories that reflect the diversity of our young readers. Prior to joining Zando, she was at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, where she edited the #1 New York Times bestseller Firekeeper’s Daughter  by Angeline Boulley, winner of the Morris and Printz Awards, and #1 New York Times bestsellers Children of Blood and Bone and Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi. She’s had the honor and joy of working with authors such as Dhonielle Clayton, Lesley Livingston, Goldy Moldavsky, Tochi Onyebuchi, Margaret Owen, Jenn Reese, and Queer Eye star Karamo Brown. Her acquisitions for Zando include Maurene Goo’s Throwback, and two young readers titles with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant for Get Lifted Books.

Erin Wicks is a Senior Editor acquiring literary and upmarket fiction, as well as narrative nonfiction for Zando. Her list emphasizes underrepresented and multicultural voices exploring a range of themes, including identity, family, sexuality, trauma, community, and power. She also has a love for literary fantasy, magical realism, sci-fi, and historical fiction, as well as books in translation. Her recent acquisitions include A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysha Chang for SJP Lit. Prior to joining Zando, Erin spent a decade at HarperCollins Publishers, where she edited and published New York Times bestsellers and critically acclaimed titles, including NBCC Award for Fiction winner, National Book Award finalist, and Oprah Book Club pick, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

Sarah Ried is a senior editor acquiring nonfiction of all types that explores themes of race, class, gender, history, geography, politics, society, and timely cultural and global issues. She aims to uplift writers from marginalized backgrounds and explore the diversity of lived experiences in American culture. Before joining Zando, she worked at HarperCollins for over five years, where she published the New York Times bestseller Patriarchy Blues and the Target Book Club Pick Black Girls Must Die Exhausted, among others. A graduate of Columbia University, she lives in Brooklyn.

Sareena Kamath is an Editor publishing genre and genre-bending fiction of all kinds (science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, horror, suspense, crime), but especially those projects which shed light on underrepresented perspectives, take place outside Western contexts, and grapple with contemporary sociocultural themes and radical politics without sacrificing satisfying storytelling. She comes to Zando from Little, Brown and Company/Mulholland Books, and has recently acquired Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle, Alaina Urquhart’s The Butcher and the Wren, and Margot Douaihy’s Scorched Grace for Gillian Flynn Books.

Prior to Zando, Caolinn Douglas worked at Hachette UK as Marketing and Publicity Trainee at Little, Brown Book Group, before joining Bookouture in August 2019 as Publishing Executive. Caolinn joined Zando in March 2021 and acquires upmarket and literary fiction for the adult list. Caolinn seeks to prioritize marginalized voices and looks for socially-grounded and culturally-incisive writing that explores themes of identity and belonging and interrogates who we are as individuals and societies. Recent acquisitions include Lara Williams’s The Odyssey, and Liv Little’s Rosewater for Get Lifted Books.

TJ Ohler is an Editorial Assistant at Zando Young Readers. Prior to joining Zando, they were a literary assistant at Andrea Brown Literary Agency and a children’s bookseller and assistant store manager at the beloved NYC-based children’s bookstore, Books of Wonder.

Maya Raiford Cohen is a recent graduate of Yale University where she majored in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Prior to Zando, she worked at Yale University Press as an Acquisitions and Editorial Intern.

Anna Hall has experience in digital marketing strategy and consumer insights across the media industry, from books to film and music. She recently received her MBA from Columbia Business School, with a focus on media and technology. During her MBA, she spent time at Paramount Pictures where she managed consumer insights and marketing research, identifying target audiences and key messaging for franchises such as A Quiet Place, Paw Patrol and Scream. She has also worked at Sony Music Entertainment in streaming analytics and spent several years at Hachette Book Group crafting creative marketing campaigns for bestselling and award-winning books.

Allegra Green has spent over a decade working across book marketing. A graduate of Pace University’s Master’s in Publishing program, Allegra began her career at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers where she worked with award-winning authors and illustrators and led marketing efforts across the licensing program, partnering with brands such as My Little Pony, Lego, Despicable Me, and Marvel. In 2018, she joined Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, where she was instrumental in the marketing outreach for New York Times bestselling books Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley, All the Stars and Teeth by Adalyn Grace, The Children of Blood and Bone Series by Tomi Adeyemi, and the 2021 Caldecott Winner We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade. Prior to joining Zando, Allegra handled product marketing for business titles at John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Amelia Olsen began her career on the Speakers Bureau team at Macmillan Trade Publishers. Along with managing finance and marketing duties, Amelia planned speaking events for #1 New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah, Pulitzer Prize winner Eliza Griswold, and parenting icon Julie Lythcott-Haims, among many other esteemed writers. She is a graduate of Boston University and the Columbia Publishing Course.

Sara Hayet began her career working on electoral and issue advocacy campaigns in Pennsylvania and Virginia before serving as a chief of staff in the Virginia state legislature. Throughout her political career, Sara valued the opportunity to work with storytellers from diverse backgrounds to amplify their stories to wider audiences, whether through press materials, media trainings, or events. She recently combined this experience with her lifelong love of books and transitioned to the publishing industry. Prior to joining Zando, she worked for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and Picador as a marketing & publicity assistant. She is a graduate of Lafayette College and the New York University Summer Publishing Institute.

Sarah Schneider has been in independent publishing for a decade. She started her career at The Experiment, where she worked in publicity, sales, art, and production. Prior to joining Zando, she was the Production Manager at Restless Books, a nonprofit publisher of literature in translation. She holds a master’s in comparative literature from the University of Amsterdam.

Khalil Commissiong is Zando’s Sales and Operations Coordinator/Executive Administrator. He was previously an intern at Penguin Random House where he worked in The Crown Publishing Group’s marketing department. There he helped develop and implement strategies to grow authors’ online presence and supported various title campaigns by conducting market research and outreach projects. In his current role, he assists with sales reporting and analysis, and helps manage operations at the Zando offices.