Meet Legacy Lit
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Krishan Trotman
VP, Publisher
Krishan Trotman is the Vice-President, Publisher of Legacy Lit. She joined Hachette Books in 2016. In 2020 she launched Legacy Lit, an imprint dedicated to books that give voice to issues, authors, and communities that have been marginalized, underserved, and overlooked. This includes BIPOC authors, all women, and any group that they believe deserves a spotlight. The imprint is committed to promoting equality, equity, and inclusion for all people. The books are bold, mission-driven commercial works. Social justice and empowerment are Trotman’s passion. She likes to work with authors who are candid, bold, and, in their own unique way, not afraid to shake things up.
Her authors have included a range of award-winning and New York Times bestsellers, including late Representative John Lewis’ Across That Bridge; journalist Stephanie Land’s #3 New York Times bestseller Maid (an Obama Pick on his 2020 Summer Reading list and a #1 Netflix series); former CEO of BET Debra Lee’s I am Debra Lee; Marisa Renee Lee’s bestseller Grief is Love, Olympic medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad’s Proud; cohost of MS NOW’s The Weekend Antonia Hylton’s #4 New York Times bestseller Madness, cohost of the Today Show’s national bestselling Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By, Morning Joe cohost Mika Brzezinski’s Earn It! and Comeback Careers; star of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan Ryan Serhant’s national bestseller Sell It Like Serhant, former U.S. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s Independent, and former U.S. Secretary of Education and SUNY Chancellor John B. King’s national bestseller Teacher by Teacher, to name a few.
Krishan has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, New York Magazine, Essence Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Salon, Shondaland, CSPAN, and more. She is the author of Black, Black Bird. She is the Beyoncé of Books and mom to her son Bleu.
Estefania Acquaviva
Senior Publicist
Estefania Acquaviva is a Senior Publicist for Grand Central Publishing and Legacy Lit. She began her publishing career at Simon & Schuster, and interned for both Flatiron Books and Little, Brown and Company, before officially joining the GCP division as the Publicity and Marketing Assistant for Twelve Books. To each media campaign, she brings a balance of traditional tent-poles strategies, as well as creative “new media” opportunities. Over the years, she has gotten the opportunity to work closely with New York Times bestselling authors like Senator Tammy Duckworth, Susan Page, Dan Pfeiffer, Shea Serrano, George Stephanopoulos, Neko Case, and Ed Helms. She graduated from Villanova University with a Bachelor of Arts, where she double-majored in English and Spanish Literature, and minored in both Creative Writing and Business. She attended the NYU Summer Publishing Institute, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. As a native Ecuadorian and Spanish speaker, she takes pride in championing the inclusion of BIPOC storytellers in publishing, and is excited to continue to support her authors throughout the publication process of their books.
Amina Iro
Editor
Amina Iro is an Editor at Legacy Lit where she has worked on books by authors like Colin Kaepernick, Al Roker and Courtney Roker Laga, Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Lindsey Stewart, Tiffany Moon M.D., Langston Hughes, and Ntozake Shange. She started her publishing career as an Editorial Assistant at Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, where she worked on titles by esteemed authors such as Cicely Tyson and Zora Neale Hurston. A writer and performance poet originally from Prince George’s County, MD, Amina has held writing fellowships at Rosemary’s House, Take World Lisbon, the Watering Hole, and the Hustson/Wright Foundation. She has performed her original work at venues in the US, England, Nigeria, and South Africa. She is interested in nonfiction books with brave motifs that invite readers to the juncture of identity and social change and create new awareness through crucial, yet overlooked connections. In particular, she is passionate about social histories, narrative nonfiction, social science, psychology; books that continue the legacies of our literary greats; and commercial speculative fiction, horror, women’s fiction, and novels that illuminate Black and sapphic life. She is a graduate of the First Wave program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds a B.S. in Neurobiology and English Creative Writing.
Maya Lewis
Senior Marketing Manager
Maya Lewis is the Senior Marketing Manager for Legacy Lit Books. She began her publishing career at HarperCollins working with Amistad Books, HarperVia, and HarperCollins Espanol. She has worked with bestselling authors including Al Roker, Debra Lee, John B. King, Jr, Antonia Hylton, Cicely Tyson, Bakari Sellers, and the estates of Zora Neale Hurston and Dick Gregory among many others. She takes immense pride in working to establish diverse and BIPOC storytelling in the book marketplace and making sure that publishers work to find and develop underrepresented readerships. Maya studied English Literature and Sociology before receiving her Master’s in Journalism from the City University of New York, where she focused on cultural criticism and documentary film. She is also a poet and mixed-media artist. Maya was a Brooklyn Poets 2021 Fellow, a 2022 Tin House Workshop alum and has exhibited work at Weeksville Heritage Center, among others.
Mahito Indi Henderson
Editorial Assistant
Mahito Indi Henderson is an Editorial Assistant at Legacy Lit where he has worked on books including Reshona Landfair’s Who’s Watching Shorty?, Richelle Fredson’s Do The Thing, Dr. Allycin Powell-Hicks’ The Problem with Pretty, Lauren Handel Zander’s Maybe It’s Them, and more. He previously worked in the editorial department at Skein Press in Dublin, Ireland, an independent publishing house that champions authors from underrepresented communities. He received his BA from Northwestern University, where he studied creative writing, film, and art theory and practice, and his MA from University College Cork. Mahito’s writing has been published in Holy Show, The Moth, The Echo, and The Foundationalist, among others. He is a two-time recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award and was a finalist for The Iowa Review Awards. He is seeking commercial and upmarket fiction across genre, as well as platform-driven narrative nonfiction. His editorial interests include international voices, including works in translation, with a strong interest in South Korea, Japan, France, Spain, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, and Chile. He enjoys projects that land at the intersection of culture, identity, sexuality, and humor. For fiction, these include plot-driven, “pressure cooker” novels, especially in contemporary horror, thriller, crime, comedy, LGBTQ+, and realist speculative science fiction. For nonfiction, he is interested in deep-dives on specific topics, as well as select memoir, food and drink, and environmental works.