Have you start­ed your read­ing list for 2011 yet? If not, we have the first one for your list! 2008 Sami Rohr Prize win­ner Lucette Lagnado’s new mem­oir has just been announced: The Arro­gant Years: A Young Girl’s Quest for Her Lost Youth. Her new title will jux­ta­pose her own com­ing of age in New York with that of her moth­er in Cairo, reveal­ing how the choic­es she made meant both a lib­er­a­tion from old world tra­di­tions and the loss of a com­fort­ing and famil­iar com­mu­ni­ty. If you want­ed to know more about her moth­er in The Man in the White Shark­skin Suit, now is your chance! We’ll pro­vide more infor­ma­tion once the book is published…be patient..only 2 years to go…

Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor and now CEO, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.