The Literary Lineage of Amina Iro

If you want to make it in the publishing industry, says Amira Iro ’18, you’d be wise to seek good teachers, both in school and out.

“You have to find mentors in this industry,” Iro says. “It’s very much apprentice-led.”

Iro is an associate editor with the Hachette Book Group, an international publishing conglomerate, where she works on the Legacy Lit imprint. In October, Publishers Weekly named her one of its stars to watch. But her path into publishing was neither straight nor simple. Rather, it was connections to a series of mentors, both during and after her time at UW–Madison, that led Iro to book publishing. “It wasn’t a dream job for me,” she says, “though I had been a voracious reader as a young person and clearly had been in the literary arts my whole life.”

Iro grew up in Washington, DC’s Maryland suburbs, and in high school, she enjoyed a mix of science and literature, studying biology and performing spoken-word poetry.

“I never felt like I had to choose between science and arts as a high school student,” she says. “I was in a rigorous science and technology program, and then after school, I would get on the train and go perform at different organizations throughout DC.”

The UW’s First Wave program brought her to Madison. The hip-hop arts program not only offered a further focus on poetry; it also offered a full scholarship. On campus, Iro continued to split her time between art and science, double-majoring in English and neurobiology. But as her collegiate experience drew to a close, she realized that she needed to find a career — and literature, rather than science, offered an opportunity.

“About three months before the end of college I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I need a job,’ ” she says. “That’s the point of all this!”

Help arrived from Elizabeth Acevedo, a National Book Award–winning author whom Iro had met on an academic trip to South Africa and who had been supportive of Iro’s poetry. Acevedo gave her a connection to an internship at HarperCollins, the firm that was then publishing Acevedo’s books.

“That’s when something kind of flipped for me,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, there’s a whole career where people make books!’ So I landed the internship and began shadowing an editor at HarperCollins and was hired to work at an imprint called Amistad.”

From 2018 to 2021, Iro worked on Amistad, building a specialty in finding and publishing books by Black authors. In 2022, she joined Hachette, where she found another mentor, Krishan Trotman, whom Iro says is “the self-proclaimed Beyoncé of books.” Trotman helped Iro refine and focus the kinds of books she wants to work with.

“Part of why I left [Amistad] was because I knew I wanted to work on a broader range of books,” she says. “Working at Amistad had given me a really staunch appreciation for Black literature. But I still knew that I wanted to [expand].”

Trotman brought Iro into Hachette and Legacy Lit, where the mission is to publish books about social justice that elevate and celebrate marginalized communities. Iro’s work has included publishing new editions of Sing a Black Girl’s Song by Ntozake Shange and Blues in Stereo by Langston Hughes.

“Those two books are special because we paired those deceased authors, those posthumous authors with contemporary writers who were operating sort of in their lineage,” says Iro. “That’s sort of part of the perspective that I’m coming into — what happens when you put Langston Hughes in a conversation with someone like [fellow First Wave grad] Danez Smith [’12] who is also a contemporary queer writer.”

As a “rising star,” Iro is becoming a mentor for a following generation of writers and editors. “Every time I talk to a young publishing person, I really try to push them to find a niche for themselves and ask for what they want and really vet who you’re working for as much as they’re vetting you, because that’s the true way to grow.”