Susan McHenry returns to Black Issues Book Review as editorial director
 
(March 25, 2006) As part of its recent acquisition of Black Issues Book Review magazine, Target Market News, Inc. president, Ken Smikle, has announced that award-winning editor, Susan McHenry is returning to her former position as Editorial Director of the bi-monthly beginning in April.

McHenry, who most recently served the magazine in the position of Editor-at-Large, was founding editor when the publication was launched seven years ago. In her new post, she will oversee the development of editorial content for Black Issues Book Review, its Web site, www.bibookreview.com, and future news and information vehicles being planned by the company.
 
“We are thrilled to have Susan back on the staff full-time,” said Smikle, Black Issues Book Review‘s President and Publisher. “Her years of extensive experience, both with this magazine and other publications, will be invaluable as we pursue growth opportunities for the company.”

“I’m looking forward to working more closely with my colleagues at Black Issues Book Review during this important new phase,” said McHenry. “There is a tremendous amount of activity in the African-American book market, so it's an exciting time once again to be part of the team that has always been the best at chronicling those developments.”
 
The other key members of Black Issues Books Review’s editorial staff are Angela Dodson, executive editor since 2003, and Clarence Reynolds, managing editor since 2004. Both Dodson and Reynolds have worked with BIBR in various editorial positions almost from its introduction.

For more than 25 years, veteran journalist Susan McHenry has been a key editor at pioneering magazines and Web sites that have identified and served untapped reader sensibilities among African Americans and among women at large. In addition to heading the editorial team that launched Black Issues Book Review in 1999, she helped with the development of BIBR's Web site, bibookreview.com. That same year the publication was named one of the “Ten Best New Magazines” by the American Library Journal.

McHenry is also a contributing writer to ESSENCE magazine, with which she has worked in various capacities since 1997.
 
In 1989, McHenry anchored the start-up editorial team of Emerge magazine under founder Wilmer Ames and helped build its franchise as a respected monthly magazine of news analysis and commentary from an African American perspective. (Emerge ceased publication in 2000.)

Prior to that, she spent nine years as an editor at Ms. magazine (1978-87), where she won a Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award for best magazine column for "Sally Hemmings: A Key to Our National Identity."
 
She has also been a senior editor at Working Woman magazine (1993-95) and executive editor of The Quarterly Black Review of Books (1995-96, now known as QBR), as well as contributing editor to women.com, a Web magazine for women that merged into iVillage.com.
 
A native of Louisville, Kentucky (to which she returns frequently to visit family), McHenry earned a bachelor's with honors in American history and literature from Harvard-Radcliffe and a master's degree in literature from Boston University. She was a 1987-88 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University.
 
McHenry, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, is also a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, the Women's Media Group and the American Society of Magazine Editors. Widely interviewed in all media (print, TV, radio and online), she has taught as an adjunct professor at New York University and New York City College of Technology, and currently teaches writing at Brooklyn's Medgar Evers College, CUNY.
 
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