The New Voices New Rooms conference swung into high gear on its second day, Tuesday, August 4. The day began with individual membership meetings for the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, who gathered separately in adjoining rooms at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel in Baltimore.

Liz Hottel, NAIBA’s incoming executive director, presided over her first membership meeting as the organization bade farewell to outgoing executive director Eileen Dengler, who is retiring, though she will remain at the helm of the professional booksellers school that she founded in 2020. As NAIBA booksellers applauded Dengler, as well as outgoing board president Hannah Oliver Depp for their years of service, the SIBA booksellers next door also began paying tribute to Dengler and Depp.

“We could hear people applauding in the other room,” SIBA executive director Linda-Marie Barrett said, “so we decided to be louder. And then—as we were told later—NAIBA could hear us, because they started applauding even louder—so we roared. It’s another example of why we’re so perfect: camaraderie and a gentle competitive spirit.”

Tuesday’s schedule focused on the exhibit area, which was packed with booksellers throughout the day, many of them making orders with the 148 representatives of 90 companies staffing 71 exhibits. “There are a lot of new bookstores,” said Lauren Klouda, a Sourcebooks rep. “We’re having incredible conversations. NAIBA and SIBA emphasized that it’s an order-ready show: if people place an order with a publisher, they can enter into a raffle for prizes. It’s neat, taking orders, like in the old days.”

Offerings included books in every category that would appeal to NAIBA booksellers as much as SIBA booksellers, and fiction prevailed. Several booksellers told PW that they were eager to get their hands on Percival Everett’s next novel, Serious Music (Doubleday, Mar. 2027), as galley copies went fast.

Marianne Wald, the general manager of East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C., was excited about YA fiction, especially Lois Lowry’s Building 903 (Clarion, Sept.) and Elizabeth Acevedo’s Anger Is Only a Shadow (Quill Tree, Sept.). But adult fiction also drew her, and she anticipates that Deesha Philyaw’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman (Mariner, Sept.), is going to be a hot pick. She noted that Philyaw’s 2020 short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia UP) “was a huge favorite with our customers.”

Priscilla Martinez, the owner of West Side Stories in Purcellville, Va., and Tamara Olmedo, the owner of Cuentos y Café in Asheville, N.C., were both pumped about American History: The Latin Remix (First Second, Feb. 2027) by actor and comedian John Leguizamo. Olmedo, was also intending to request a galley copy of The Girls from Humboldt Park (Liveright, April 2027) by Marisel Vera.

Martinez noted that she is also excited about Godine’s June reissue of Padma Viswanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon, originally published in 2008, “It’s one of those books that you just know will take you on a journey,” she said of the 632-page epic tale set in India.

Lucy Kogler, the manager of Talking Leaves…Books in Buffalo, N.Y., who is attending her first NVNR show, concluded that the exhibit area—and indeed the whole show—“had a really good energy, and everyone here is really into celebrating Eileen. The vibe is celebratory.”

End of an era

The celebration of Dengler continued at that evening’s NAIBA and SIBA awards dinner, which culminated with the presentation of NAIBA’s Legacy Award to Dengler. Half a dozen people, including NAIBA’s Depp and SIBA’s Barrett praised Dengler’s dedication to booksellers for the past 40 years, including 27 as NAIBA’s first executive director.

“She cares about bookstores everywhere,” Depp said. “She understands that the bookstores are the booksellers and the booksellers are the bookstores.” Dengler is “probably the hardest working person I’ve ever met,” Barrett added. “She is a visionary. We share a dark sense of humor that if you run conferences, you have to have.”

“My family is here,” Dengler said when she took to the podium. “And to them, I want to say, look around this room. These people are my work family. This has been my family for 40 years. Every person here. These are the people I was thinking of, working for, writing to, talking to, all those decades in my office, late into the night, all those years on the road. It was for them. I was always with them. It was never work. It was all about the people I was able to be with.”

Addressing her audience of more than 200 booksellers and publisher reps, Dengler concluded her remarks by imploring all to “disrupt this industry to find the waste, inefficiencies, and inequities, so we can bring stories to readers that make a good living for those who write the stories, publish the stories, and sell the stories. And I know that there's someone in this room who can lift that flag now. Call me. Let’s try to disrupt things and make it better for all of us.”

NVNR will conclude today with the Moveable Feast breakfast, followed by seven retreat sessions for different categories of booksellers, ranging from owners to managers to frontline booksellers.

PW overestimated the number of attendees at the Tuesday evening awards dinner; this story has been updated with the correct information.