Kiera Parrott Named Reviews Director of Library Journal and School Library Journal

From a Library Journal /School Library Journal News Release:

Library Journal and School Library Journal are pleased to announce the unification of the journals’ Reviews Departments, bringing together the teams that currently produce all the review and book and media trend related products published under the LJ and SLJ brands each year. This unified department will be led by Kiera Parrott, who has been named Reviews Director for both journals. She will continue to report to Rebecca T. Miller, editorial director of LJ and SLJ.
Parrott, who came to SLJ in 2014 as Reviews Editor from Darien Library, will oversee the Reviews enterprise across the SLJ and LJ brands, with both reviews teams reporting to her.
“The goal of this department unification is to help the excellent work done by the reviews team be even more meaningful in our immediate markets and beyond by focusing on building relevance, fostering a more robust culture of innovation, applying strategic thinking to the reviews missions, and gaining capacity through streamlined processes aligned with best practices—with quality and authority always top of mind,” said Miller. “I am excited to be working with Kiera and her team in this capacity, and look forward to what comes next.”
Two Review Team Manager positions have also been created, reporting to Parrott, to provide daily management of the SLJ and LJ reviews teams. Stephanie Klose has been named LJ Review Team Manager and Shelley Diaz has been named the SLJ Review Team Manager. Each will retain their core subject specializations (Media and Teen, respectively), while stepping up to the additional responsibility of managing the teams, supporting brand integrity and alignment with the overall news and feature development of LJ and SLJ respectively, and creating a unified workflow to enable higher level editorial work from this talented group.
“Across these two journals is a massive brain trust; every day I work with some of the industry’s brightest minds when it comes to literature for children, teens, and adults,” said Parrott. “This shift will enable me to help the editors focus more clearly on the important work they do—and give me the flexibility to shine a light on that work and ensure that our reviews have the best impact and are reaching librarians and readers where they are.”
To speed the essential editorial and production flow of the reviews team overall, Annalisa Pesek will move into the group in her current capacity as assistant managing editor and a new, parallel assistant managing editor role has been created. These two assistant managing editors will report directly to Parrott and focus on enabling efficiency while ensuring quality across all the reviews-related content the group publishes, deepening market connections, and facilitating more robust reviewer relations.
The second assistant managing editor role replaces the LJ reviews editor position left open with Henrietta Verma’s departure.

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