Meet the Team: Nadine Santoro
Ever wondered how our books get made? Yearned for a peek behind the indie publishing curtain? Today’s your lucky day! Deep Vellum Publishing is run by a small but mighty team of passionate people—from Dallas to Brooklyn to Rochester to Barcelona—whose work allows us to carry out our mission of bringing the world into conversation through literature. We’ll be sharing profiles weekly so you can get to know the people behind the books!
First up is our Publicity Director, Nadine Santoro. Read on as she shares about the joy of working closely with authors, juggling her work as a publicist with her own creative activities, and her trombone skills.
Where are you based? Brooklyn, NY
What’s your role at Deep Vellum? I’m the Publicity Director—essentially, my job is figuring out how to get our books into the hands of their ideal readers. I share advance copies of our forthcoming titles with reviewers, literary journals, newspapers, magazines, podcast hosts, and bloggers, arrange interviews with our authors and translators, and coordinate festival and university appearances for authors, among lots of other little things that oil the wheels of the publishing machine. Lately I’ve had the chance to work with designers on several book covers, which is so fun! I also plan book tours and other literary events across the country (and sometimes across the globe).
What's the best or most interesting part of your job? My favorite part of my job by far is getting to connect directly with authors and translators, support them through the publication process, and celebrate them when the book is out in the world. It's especially rewarding to work with authors putting out their debut book, or help an international author find their audience in the American literary scene when we publish their English-language debut in translation.
What is your favorite book we've published, and why? As a Libra, I have a chronic aversion to picking just one favorite—it really depends on the mood! But one that I only recently read, long overdue, is Anne Garréta's Sphinx, translated by Emma Ramadan. It's beautiful, it's haunting, it's a feat of writing and of translation. If you don't know the premise of this book I recommend you go in blind and experience all its misdirections and tricks of the light firsthand.
What’s your background? Much of my life now revolves around books and writing: I host a monthly reading series in Brooklyn, write a newsletter about creative practice and occasionally teach on the topic, co-host a podcast about romance novels, and I'm a writer myself. At my heart of hearts, though, I've always very much been a jack-of-all-trades. I also do fiber art, I play the trombone (badly, but I do play it), I lead spiritual retreats. Most recently, I worked in publicity and events at Feminist Press, but I actually made a career pivot into this industry in 2020. Before that, my full-time job was in education as a reading specialist!
What’s a forthcoming book from any of our imprints that you're looking forward to? There's a lot I'm excited about that's coming down the pipeline soon. Among them: Hera Lindsay Bird's hilarious and earnest poetry collection Juvenilia (June 2025), and the Dalkey Essentials edition of Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes (February 2026) complete with her original woodcut illustrations. I’m also tremendously psyched for Filth Eaters by Ito Romo, forthcoming in Summer 2026—Aztec gothic vampire horror, anyone??
Do you have any pets? I am the proud dad of two senior rescue dogs, Neil, a Chihuahua mix, and Knives, a Pomeranian mix. (Yes, they're named after characters from Scott Pilgrim).
What's your favorite bad television show? Unfortunately, I do love a good detective show or police procedural. My fiancée and I are currently making our way through 9-1-1 which is an absolutely bonkers, goofy show mostly about firefighters that has also somehow managed to make me tear up more than once. Curse you, Ryan Murphy...