November 11, 2004 For more information: Frank R. Scatoni 619-807-1887 frank@ventureliterary.com "No Kill Date" Venture Literary Sells Literary Memoir to Penguin Press On November 11, 2004, Frank R. Scatoni of Venture Literary, representing Caille Millner, sold the World rights to her untitled literary memoir to Scott Moyers at the Penguin Press. Millner, one of Columbia Journalism Review’s "Ten Young Writers on the Rise" and currently a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, reinvents the racial-identity memoir for her generation in her wise, funny, and deeply felt chronicle of negotiating the bazaar of off-the-rack identities on offer to her in Northern California in the late 1990s on the way toward learning to stop crafting identity narratives for her various audiences—from her friends in her Latino neighborhood to her classmates at Harvard—and how to start crafting one for herself. Millner’s beautiful writing, coupled with her unmatched insight into the youth culture of America, make her one of the next great literary voices in this country. Just twenty-five years old now, Millner published her first article when she was sixteen—an exposé of her high school’s unfair treatment of black students. When it was published in the San Jose Mercury News, Millner was ostracized and threatened with expulsion. But it also started Millner on a journey that has taken her from the Bay Area to Harvard and ultimately into a career in journalism that has produced articles in Newsweek, Essence, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Understanding, and The Fader. Millner’s narrative, however, is not just the examination of an individual life, but also a portrait of California’s fluid culture during a very particular time—the Internet boom of the 1990s—and thus a vivid portrait of America as a whole. She exposes the surreal and bewildering side of California’s sunny stories—from diversity, with its false promise of tolerance and sensitivity for all people, to the booming technology industry, which was supposed to change the world for the better. Thanks to what she calls an "affliction" (a reserved personality combined with an insatiable desire for experiences of all kinds), Millner spent her childhood drifting among all the movements—from multiculturalism to green living to anti-gentrification to Silicon Valley’s burgeoning Internet culture—that made California in the 1990s what it was. The result is a unique narrative that paints a vivid portrait of a fascinating youth—a youth that is increasingly becoming the experience of the next American generation. "Caille Millner’s voice exploded into my head from the first page," said Scott Moyers, senior editor of the Penguin Press. "Labeling someone an important voice of her generation is an awful albatross, but because Caille can both write about the human particularity of her own circumstances with such vividness, linguistic freshness, and imaginative power, and at the same time—that rarest of balancing acts—see the larger patterns, because, in particular, she’s managed to craft an unforgettable identity narrative that’s centrally about the way the world seems to demand of people of her generation, and especially people who are "multi-cultural," an identity narrative—because she seems to be at once deeply inside her own experiences and far above them—this feels like news from the front, the kind of news that will stay news for a long time to come. I couldn’t be more delighted to work with her." Caille Millner is the co-author of The Promise, a book written with philanthropist Oral Lee Brown, which will be published by Doubleday in April 2005. In addition to her magazine and newspaper work, Millner’s writing has appeared in the Simon & Schuster anthology Children of the Dream: Growing Up Black in America. She has been a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Fiction Award, as well as awards from the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, the National Press Club, the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust, and the New York Black Journalists’ Association. In 2000–2001, she was a Berta Ledecky Fellow at Harvard Magazine. In 2002, when she was voted one of Columbia Journalism Review’s "Ten Young Writers on the Rise," it was said of her: "You meet her and you get the sense that she’s someone who you’re going to want to work for some day." From November 2001 to June 2003, she was a special correspondent for Newsweek magazine in South Africa. At present, she is a commentator for Pacific News Service in San Francisco and a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. To learn more about Venture Literary, visit: www.ventureliterary.com. To learn more about the Penguin Press, visit: http://us.penguingroup.com/