Stella Connell, previously of Doubleday, Random House, Inc. and G. P. Putnam Sons, founded The Connell Agency in 1998. She has twenty years of experience developing and implementing successful public relations and marketing campaigns for some of the most well-known writers in America today. Connell has been the sole publicist for over 100 books, including many New York Times and regional best-sellers, and has been referred to as “the best book publicist in the United States,” by a major independent bookseller.
Connell has conducted campaigns for Pulitzer Prize-winners David Halberstam, Michael Chabon, and Junot Diaz; along with Zadie Smith, Caroline Kennedy, Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, Marianne Williamson, Kaye Gibbons, Sara Nelson, Nuala O’Faolain, Lee Smith, Robert Hicks, Kathleen Norris, Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, Clyde Edgerton, Neil White, and Harper’s Magazine, among many others.
She has served as a panelist and speaker for the Oxford Conference on the Book, the North Carolina Writers’ Conference, the Ferguson Lecture Series at the College of William and Mary, the Southern Festival of Books, the Jackson Hole Writers’ Conference, Birmingham Southern University’s “Writing Today,” and the Chancellor’s Leadership Class at the University of Mississippi. Additionally, she has spoken to the MFA programs at the University of Florida, Virginia Commonwealth University and New York University. She was a member of the Women’s Media Group in New York City and was named one of the “50 Leading Business Women” in Mississippi in 1999. She was also the recipient of a Rotary International Group Study Exchange Scholarship in March 2000 to Australia to study the book publishing industry “Down Under.”
News articles and mentions about her work have appeared in Publishers Weekly, Mississippi Magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Clarion Ledger, and the Oxford Eagle, the local newspaper in Oxford, Mississippi, where she was born and raised. She received both B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Alabama and attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course at Harvard.