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AAPRC Weekly: Gilda Squire

Gilda Squire
Director of Publicity
Amistad Imprint, Harper Collins
NYC


If Gilda Squire's life were a book, it would be one part tearjerker, two parts Horatio Alger, and an altogether inspirational pageturner. The director of publicity for Harper Collins' Amistad imprint started life in the small Virginia town of Ruther Glen. An only child, Squire led a quiet, sheltered life until she was 15 and a harsh reality intruded. Squire's mother died and she and her father were left to make their way through grief and financial upheaval. "My mom really did protect me from a lot," Squire remembers. "All I had to do was study and read and work hard in school. I didn't even have to do chores except when I was punished…I had to grow up overnight, literally."

Since the age of 10, Squire had been offered the opportunity to skip grades. After her mother's passing, she took the chance and skipped her junior year. By the time she was 16, Squire had a high school diploma and, because money was tight, was looking for a job. As it turns out, the FBI field office 45 minutes away in Richmond was hiring. "I was sad that I didn't go to college at the time," says Squire. "But I figured it would come."

Meanwhile, the 16-year-old took the FBI typing pool by storm. She was making $12,000 a year and, through youthful, energetic eyes, figured she was ahead of the curve. She jumped into working life with gusto. Less than a year later, she was a big fish –– the lead fill-in for the switchboard as well as for the assistant to the office's supervisory special agent. At 17, she earned top secret clearance and was certified to receive and send teletypes, the method used to communicate with agents in the field. Squire was learning everything she could and earning the respect of her coworkers. Just before she turned 18, though, another ugly life lesson shook things up. A full time assistant's position became available and although Squire was the most qualified candidate, the job went to a slightly older but less experienced white woman. "Everybody assumed that I was going to get the job because it made sense. I knew how to do the job. I was the go-to person," Squire recalls. "That was the first time that I dealt with racism in the workplace. For a 17, almost 18-year-old, that's a hard thing."

Squire channeled her anger and hurt into action. She'd just returned from a temporary assignment at the Washington Field Office and decided she'd had enough of Richmond. She demanded a transfer to Washington and got it. Her boss in the typing pool warned her that she'd never get a desk at the Washington office, that she'd just end up back in the typing pool. Two weeks after her relocation to the Washington Metropolitan Field Office of the FBI, Squire got her former co-workers and her old boss on the phone, to let them know she was the new administrative assistant supporting the Supervisory Special Agent of Foreign Counterintelligence-Russia. She was 18 years old.

"You can do anything. It's not about how old you are," says Squire of the lessons learned during that phase of her career. "You may run into adversity, but at the end of the day if you keep going for what you want you'll get it. No one can stop you."

After two years with the FBI, Squire went to work for the director of the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, assisting some of the country's brightest minds in monitoring the development of emerging technologies. She'd been there for two years when her boss called her into this office and told her it was time for her to start planning for her future. He demanded that she go to college and gave her the flexible schedule and some of the financial aid she needed to make the longdelayed dream a reality. Squire continued working full time while pursuing a full schedule of classes at George Mason University. She majored in communications and even managed to squeeze in an internship at Sister 2 Sister magazine before graduating cum laude in just three-and-a-half years.

During her time at Sister 2 Sister, Squire got a taste for feature writing, and penned cover stories on R&B singer Toni Braxton, actress Michael Michele and child star Raven-Symone. The tireless Squire went on to launch herself as a freelancer and for several years wrote entertainment features and music reviews for magazines such as Upscale and Black Elegance.

In 1996, armed with her new degree, Squire departed DC for New York, her eye on a career in entertainment public relations. With her experience and education, she had a number of great offers, but even though she was still in her mid-twenties, Squire was hardly the typical college graduate. "I had quite a work history under my belt, so I wasn't looking to make $20,000 a year in New York…I could not see making those basic life sacrifices at that point," says Squire. "I wasn't willing to be anybody's intern…I had some requirements and those requirements could not be met in the entertainment industry." Instead, a headhunter pointed Squire toward Wall Street. She went reluctantly, but ended up in the right place during exciting times.

In the 1990s, Wall Street's investment bankers were masters of the universe, brokering multi-million dollar deals during the height of the dot-com wave. Squire was hired as an assistant to three senior vice-presidents in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, one of the industry's preeminent firms. During Squire's time there, the company brokered landmark IPOs (Initial Public Offerings: a company's first sale of stock to the public), including those for eBay and AT&T Wireless – the largest IPO in U.S. history. "To see all of that happen, for someone who had no disposition for Wall Street, was awesome," says Squire of her Wall Street tenure. "I learned a lot. I got to see how Wall Street operates from an investment banking standpoint. I got to see how this preeminent firm kicks...I've been really fortunate that throughout my career I've had the opportunity to always work with the best."

While investment banking was exciting, it was not her passion, and after two years Squire decided it was time to put her communications skills to work. She went to see the head of Goldman's PR department, gave him her resume and spoke frankly. "I told him: 'I've given myself a year,'" she recalls. "'If I'm not in a position at this firm where I'm in a corporate communications capacity, I'm leaving whether I have a job or not.' He said, 'wow, that's pretty powerful.' I said, 'that's real.'"

Almost a year to the day later, Squire was offered a position in corporate communications as a brand marketing manager. During her three years in the department she traveled the world, worked on Goldman Sachs' worldwide recruitment marketing efforts and launched the firm's diversity marketing program in the U.S. Again, Squire had made a big leap into a challenging but valuable learning experience. Still, there was something missing. "I think you reach a certain point in your career, in your life, where you make the decision to do what you feel like you were destined to do," says Squire. "And while I enjoyed my time at Goldman's –– I learned so much and met so many incredible people –– the time came for me to refocus on what originally my dream was and that was to get into some form of entertainment PR. Given that I was a little older at that point, I didn't really see music being a good fit. Film is redominately L.A. I started to think, well, I've loved books since I was a little girl."

The transition from Wall Street to book publishing wasn't easy. As had been the case so many times before, people who didn't know the Gilda Squire story underestimated her. "No one wanted to hire me because, coming from Goldman Sachs, everyone was convinced I would stay for all of two seconds. I would miss the Wall Street bonuses. I would miss the money. I would miss the excitement," Squire recalls. "I had to deal with the fact it was about them, that those were not my issues."

She started her publishing PR career at Penguin Putnam where she worked with best-selling authors such as Suze Orman (The Road To Wealth), T.D. Jakes (God's Leading Lady), Dr. Hilda Hutcherson (What Your Mother Never Told You About S-E-X), and Drs. Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins (The Pact). While she admired her authors greatly and loved the opportunity to help get new books into the hands of readers, Squire was treading on new ground. First of all, the days of big Wall Street budgets were over. "You don't realize how valuable money can be when it comes to marketing people until you don't have it," Squire says. "You may think you can do a lot with $5,000, but you know what? No you can't! You have to learn to be a lot more creative, a lot more frugal when you put together campaigns. I worked strategically on Wall Street, but you have to be even more strategic and thoughtful in developing campaigns in the book publishing world. It's about money because it's a business, but it also is about helping someone's work. It's their life's work. When you're dealing with something as fragile and as sensitive as that, you have to be a lot more thoughtful in how you position and approach it."

After a little over a year at Penguin, Squire left for Hilsinger Mendelson, a private public relations firm, where she continued to work with Suze Orman, as well as former actress/fitness guru Suzanne Somers, the weekly magazine Parade, and, on one of the projects she's most proud of, the campaign for Bling (Miramax Books), the New York Times best-selling debut novel by Erica Kennedy. "That's my heart," she says of the project. "I worked really hard on that book, and working with Erica [Kennedy] was a pleasure. Seeing that book blossom from the manuscript page to becoming a New York Times best seller –- and that it was an African-American woman –– I'm as proud as I can be of that."

In 2004, Squire was named director of publicity for the Amistad Imprint at Harper Collins. Amistad publishes non-fiction and fiction titles by and about people of African descent. She also services general Harper Collins titles. "When I decided to get into publishing, I said that I wanted to work with African-American authors. It took some time, but I'm finally working with African-American authors and I'm helping them to get their voices out there, to get their voices heard," says Squire of the new position. "I jumped in full speed ahead from the moment I got here."

Amistad is coming off the high of Edward Jones' stunning Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Known World. The book, a rarity in the publishing universe –– African-American literary fiction –– was released by Amistad before Squire arrived, but because it continues to sell well The Known World is still very much on her radar. "It's very inspiring and encouraging when you go to the weekly Harper Collins meetings, and they're still talking about The Known World, says Squire. "There's more to come too. You're going to hear about amazing things coming from this imprint."

In the meantime, Squire is simply coping with the daily realities of publishing PR, like the jostling for attention amongst the tens of thousands of books published each year and, primarily, finding a place for book news in the oversaturated media sphere, among music, movies, sports and video games. "I tell people in my office that publicity falls into one of four categories: politics/terrorism, celebrity, scandal and current news. If your product doesn't fall into one of those four categories, the challenge is so much greater for you," says Squire frankly. "The way that I manage my relationships is I only go to select media with books and authors that I know for a fact they will latch onto, or maybe if they're not familiar with them I know it's a topic that they can jump on. I'm not the type of publicist who will go to media with every single thing that I have."

When she's not working –– which apparently isn't often –– Squire winds down at the gym, spends time with friends, and, of course, reads. Sundays and Mondays between August and January find her glued to a television somewhere because she became a football junkie about two seasons ago.

Mostly, though, the dynamo relishes the life and career she's built. "This is a new company for me," says Squire of her new position at Harper Collins. "Being a director, it's a little awesome for me, but I embrace it like I do everything. I embrace it with tremendous gratitude. Even though I've only been in the business for three years, I've been working towards this for a lifetime. I'm finally where I always wanted to be."

AAPRC's Mission
The African-American Public Relations Collective (AAPRC) is an assemblage of professionals who provide communication conduits among clients, journalists, media and our communities. We come together as a collective because we recognize the importance of building those same conduits amongst ourselves.

A great deal of what we do is professional development––updating our skills, keeping pace with technology, refining and streamlining processes, providing a forum to tackle the issues that impact our work environment––but we believe our professional lives benefit most from the forging of effective alliances. Connected to one another, we possess the power of a nationwide body of committed, knowledgeable practitioners with an eye on the future.

As we move into the 21st century at lightning speed, mass media and its potent messages occupy an ever-larger part of our daily lives and our collective psyche. The AAPRC is focused on helping our members gain a deeper understanding of media's force and supporting their growth as powerful participants in the global communications network.

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