November 13, 2026, 1–2PM
Webinar (Zoom)
How can a writer’s ideas, archives, research, and lived experience become a book—and what kind of book should it be? This Artist Lab session features Ibrahim Ahmad, executive editor of Viking Penguin, and explores how writers can recognize the “book-shaped” version of their practice and begin translating ambitious, idiosyncratic work into a form that editors, agents, publishers, and readers can understand. The conversation will address what makes a proposal compelling: how to balance personal story, research, and argument; and how to think about audience, publicity, and long-term readership without flattening the work’s complexity or force. The session will also consider when a project belongs with a trade publisher versus an independent press, academic press, or alternative platform.
Ibrahim Ahmad
Executive Editor, Viking Penguin
Ibrahim Ahmad joined Viking Penguin as executive editor in 2021. His nonfiction interests include current affairs, politics, history, science and technology, biography, business, and pop culture. He also publishes an eclectic array of literary fiction and crime fiction, with a particular focus on incendiary, urgent voices that subvert and expand the existing literature. His first title on the Viking list, His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other recent and forthcoming titles include works by Nathaniel Philbrick, Ruth Ozeki, Heather Cox Richardson, Nancy Isenberg, and Fab 5 Freddy. As editorial director at Akashic Books, where he worked for two decades, Ahmad published an award-winning list of extraordinary writers from around the world, including Maaza Mengiste (2019 Creative Capital Awardee) and Percival Everett (2016 Creative Capital Awardee).