Laurie Callahan started at New Directions as the Assistant to Fred Martin, then the Managing Editor (a job which included getting to the office early to make everyone coffee). She moved to Publicity, working under the fearless Griselda Ohannessian, and now, due to her great experience with the company, she is risen to the very senior position of Executive Vice President.
New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914 - 1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. "I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalled. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful."
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