Latinx in Publishing (LxP): What do you do?
Monica Fernandez (MF): I'm the Media Manager at Red Hen Press, which means I'm in charge of all of the media and publicity for the books we publish and the company as a whole. This entails working with authors, sending out books for reviews, trying to secure media coverage, and managing our social media accounts (with the help of a team of interns in my department!)
LxP: How did you get started?
MF: I actually started off as a Marketing and Media intern myself in September 2017. I was nearing the tail end of my internship in February the following year when a position opened up, which I gratefully accepted! Before that, I had taken a Master's Degree course in Creative Writing and Publishing from City University in London, and was able to intern at an independent publishing company called Head of Zeus for six months before coming back home.
LxP: What do you wish you knew before getting into the industry?
MF: How much work it takes to plan book events! I wear a lot of hats at Red Hen, and so I also serve as the Event Coordinator. Coordinating events with authors and venues, and managing the publicity for it to ensure a good turnout, takes up a lot of my time and is probably the most stressful part of my job. I worked out a pretty good system for managing it all now, but when I first started out, I was drowning!
LxP: What book are you currently working on or reading?
MF: I'm making my way through a book called Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology of new Philippine myths from Carayan Press, edited by Rachelle Cruz and Melissa Sipin. As a Filipino-American, I'm trying to find more literature written by Filipino authors, and this is a great book to start with! I'm also in the process of writing my own novel, but that's very early stages and who knows how long that could take!
Monica Fernandez graduated from the University of California, Irvine cum laude with a BA in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing, and from City University London with a MA in Creative Writing and Publishing. She has had several short fiction and creative nonfiction pieces published in The Chaffey Review, Rind Literary Magazine, Scribendi, The Left Coast Review, Creepy Gnome, and Slush Pile Magazine’s Envy anthology. She is Filipino-American, a proud Hufflepuff, and a film and theatre enthusiast.
