Kimberly Burns worked at several San Francisco bookstores, including a stint running the author events series at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, before moving to Los Angeles to work at Alfred A. Knopf’s West Coast publicity office. At Knopf she was charged with arranging media for authors on book tour to the West Coast, which she did with aplomb. The books she handled for Knopf include Evening by Susan Minot, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander, and Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. She also worked with James Ellroy, Michael Crichton, Amy Bloom, Bret Easton Ellis, and Joan Didion, amongst many others.

In 1999 Kimberly moved to New York to work at Random House. The publicity campaigns she led there, and with which she is proud to be associated, include those for White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, and Austerlitz by WG Sebald. After a few years at Random House, she returned to the Knopf group as Associate Publicity Director at Pantheon Books. In 2003 former publisher of Random House Ann Godoff started The Penguin Press and invited Kimberly and Scott Moyers, a highly esteemed senior editor, to launch the new imprint. The first list included Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize winning Ghost Wars, Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, all of which were national bestsellers.

After the initial launch of The Penguin Press Kimberly found a shingle and hung it up outside her Manhattan apartment. As an independent literary publicist she has led campaigns for The New Yorker Festival, The Moth, The Kirkus Prize, PEN World Voices Festival, FILI The Finnish Literary Exchange, and writers including Salman Rushdie, Ann Beattie, Laila Lalami, Yiyun Li, Rebecca Donner, Natalie Merchant, Susan Orlean, Imbolo Mbue, Molly Ringwald, Jon Ronson, Ann Leary, Cathleen Schine, Bill Clegg, Sloane Crosley, and Benjamin Moser. To name just a few.

In May 2015, Kimberly co-founded Broadside PR with her esteemed colleagues, Michael Taeckens and Whitney Peeling. Please visit BroadsidePR for more information.

photo credit: Richard Koek