Harry Potter’s Renowned U.S. Editor (and a Gay Dad) to Launch Diversity-Focused Publishing Company

Arthur Levine, best known as the U.S. editor of Harry Potter, is leaving publishing giant Scholastic to start his own publishing company focused on diverse books and creators.

Levine is an author and editor who has run his own imprint of award-winning books at Scholastic since 1996, and was responsible for bringing the Harry Potter series to the U.S. in 1997. He told Publishers Weekly that his new company will “center on diversity” and “high-quality bookmaking” and that they will aim to have 75 percent of the creators be “people of color, indigenous people, and LGBTQ individuals.” The tentative launch date will be the fall of 2020, initially offering 20 U.S. titles and five of “the world’s best books in translation.”

His existing imprint at Scholastic has published more than 300 fiction and nonfiction books for children and teenagers, “reflecting a diverse array of voices and winning countless awards along the way,” Scholastic said in a press release. It includes queer-inclusive titles such as middle-grade novels The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More or Less, by Emma Donoghue (about which more here and here), and young adult novel The Music of What Happens, by Bill Konigsberg. Current titles at Scholastic, including the Harry Potter books, will stay there, meaning his new venture will be bringing fresh books to market.

Levine himself has contributed to the genre of LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books with his 2011 picture book Monday Is One Day, a poem from a working parent to a child. “The hardest part of going to work is being apart from you,” it begins. “Let’s count the days till we’re both at home with a special thing to do.” Each page then shows a different family (including one with two dads) and a different activity—splashing in puddles, playing with dinosaurs, enjoying cuddles—as they name the days of the week and count down to and through the weekend.

He spoke with After Elton (now part of Logo) in 2007 about the state of queer-inclusive children’s books, noting that the financially-driven children’s publishing industry (where color printing means higher costs), “makes for even more conservatism on the part of publishers.” Levine observed, however, that in order to overcome these challenges, we need “books with great stories and illustrations that editors and booksellers are willing to champion.” On a personal note, he added:

I’m hyper-alert in bookstores looking for the book that might include our family. I’d buy anything that remotely reflected us, partly because I would want to make a vote with my pocketbook. I want to say, ‘Whoever you are in that publishing house who pushed this through, I am supporting you.’

Seems like he’s going to be using his clout and experience to push through new books for even more diverse voices. I can’t wait to see what they are.