Flatiron Books, publisher of American Dirt has announced that it is canceling the rest of the 40-city national tour by the book's author, Jeanine Cummins. Instead, they are organizing town hall meetings where Cummins will be joined by "some of the groups who have raised objections to the book."
The publisher also acknowledged that they had been caught by surprise by the anger and frustration expressed by many, which "has exposed deep inadequacies in how we at Flatiron Books address issues of representation, both in the books we publish and in the teams that work on them." They also admitted to mistakes specific to the book's promotion: "We should never have claimed that it was a novel that defined the migrant experience; we should not have said that Jeanine's husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland; we should not have had a centerpiece at our bookseller dinner last May that replicated the book jacket so tastelessly. We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them."
The publisher also acknowledged that they had been caught by surprise by the anger and frustration expressed by many, which "has exposed deep inadequacies in how we at Flatiron Books address issues of representation, both in the books we publish and in the teams that work on them." They also admitted to mistakes specific to the book's promotion: "We should never have claimed that it was a novel that defined the migrant experience; we should not have said that Jeanine's husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland; we should not have had a centerpiece at our bookseller dinner last May that replicated the book jacket so tastelessly. We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them."