Meet the Team: Sarah McEachern
Next up in the Meet the Team series is Sarah McEachern, our Rights Director. Read along as she shares about international book fairs, her Midwestern roots, and affinity for peanut butter soup.
Where are you based? Brooklyn, NY
What’s your role at Deep Vellum? I'm the Rights Director at Deep Vellum. This means I work with all of our contracts through from start to finish, and I oversee some of these contractual commitments being realized. You'll hear from me about your royalty statements, your complimentary copies, and all of your subsidiary rights -- which I pitch at book fairs around the world!
What's the best or most interesting part of your job? Going to international book fairs is still the best part of my job. I describe it a lot as another version of what our booksellers do in our bookstore -- handselling books. I ultimately love talking to people from all over the world about how they think about and read literature. One of the other interesting things I do is draft our copyright pages. We've started to include the first publisher of every book in translation or reissue on our copyright pages as a way to acknowledge the collaborative process that publishing really is across the world. One person's writing can change and transform so many times throughout the publication process!
Do you have pets? Yes, I have a black cat named Cosmo, who has a real flair for the dramatic. His birthday is on Tax Day, and in a way, he's just as demanding as the American IRS.
What is your favorite book we've published, and why? The first Deep Vellum book I've read was Sphinx by Anne Garréta, and I also really adore Stories of A Life and FEM, both of which I reviewed as a critic. My reviews ultimately led to being able to get acquainted with the press more, eventually leading to figuring out that I had a place here as the Rights Director.
What’s your background? I'm the daughter of a retired railroad worker, and I was home educated by my mother. Even though I moved to New York a decade ago to go to college, I've never shed my core Midwestern, working class homeschool vibes. A real belief in the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of things underscores a lot of my work as a publishing professional, reader, and writer. Its origin really is the way my parents encouraged me to question The Man, follow my interests, feed my curiosity, talk to strangers and listen to what they say, look for common threads instead of contradictions, and generally, and to be focused on asking better questions than being satisfied with a simple answer.
What’s a forthcoming book from any of our imprints that you're looking forward to? I'm very much looking forward to Your Name Here, Juvenilia, and The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes.
What's the best soup? Recently, I've gotten really into making peanut butter soup. It was a real staple when I lived with a bunch of vegans in cooperative housing in college, and we all made meals for each other on a small budget.
What's the best underrated movie? I saw Tótem (2023, Lila Avilés) at New Directors, New Films in 2023, and it was the best film I'd seen in years. I absolutely loved it, and I feel like almost no one has seen it. I've been yearning to talk about it with friends for ages!