In a book to be released next spring, the life story of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will be told by an Emporian.
To add to the substantial list of biographies she has already written, Antonia Felix has scored a book deal to write about the latest prominent face in the news.
It was timing and timeliness that helped her get the deal.
“The day Obama made the announcement that Sotomayor was his nominee, May 26, I had CNN on that morning when I was at my desk, and it just came to me — this is my next book,” Felix said.
She began compiling resources from Internet databases while Obama’s press conference was going on, and spent the next 36 hours straight writing a book proposal and an annotated table of contents. Her literary agent was able to get a deal for the book with Berkley Books, an imprint of Viking Penguin in New York City.
“It all happened very quickly,” Felix said. “Timing is everything with something like this, because you want to be the first one out with a book. That makes a big difference.”
Felix’s sense of timing has served her well through the years. Coming from a background in music — she also is a classical tenor — she has parlayed her skills and interests into writing. Among the 15 other biographies she has written are subjects as diverse as former First Lady Laura Bush, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Gen. Wesley Clark and Harry Connick, Jr.
She didn’t set out to be a writer.
Felix became involved with the publishing world through a set of circumstances that left her looking for work in New York City. She had gone there with her husband, Stanford Felix, so both could work on their classical singing careers.
“We both had to find day jobs, and I just shopped around for a secretarial job in some kind of industry,” she said. “I had the New York Times spread out on a friend’s living room floor and I thought I would narrow it down to things I really liked.”
She always liked books, so she got a job as an administrative assistant in a publishing house. From there, she worked her way up to junior copywriter. She then started freelancing her copywriting work and became associated with a book packager who helped her get her first book deal.
“I discovered one day that the book packager was looking for a writer to help one of his clients write his autobiography, and his client was a well-known Irish tenor named John McNally, who just wanted a book to sell to his fans at his events,” Felix said. “So I tried to persuade this packager to hire me as a collaborator because I had a background in music and I really wanted the job.”
Her next subject was Harry Connick Jr., a book she said was fun even though Connick’s father wouldn’t let Felix interview him because he thought his son was too young to have a book about him.
“One thing led to another, and each book has just kept coming after that,” she said. “I’ve been very, very fortunate.”
That same packager helped Felix find her first political subject, the biography of Christie Todd Whitman, who had just been elected governor of New Jersey.
“She was, if not the only, one of the only women governors at the time, so it was a big election,” Felix said.
Felix kept writing and moved to Emporia when Stanford got a job teaching voice at Emporia State University. Felix herself taught in the English department for a few years, and she has kept busy with her musical interests as well. She recently wrote the script for “A KCO Christmas,” a musical variety show performed at the Granada Theatre by the Kansas Concert Opera. She also continues her vocal performances.
For her latest biography, Felix has already been working on setting up interviews and compiling information. As she writes the book, she will talk to people who worked with Sotomayor in the District Attorney’s office in New York, people who worked with her in different capacities throughout her past, and, she hopes, Sotomayor’s family.
The key, she said, is to put in a great deal of original material instead of creating a book that’s just a pasted-up manuscript of already published interviews. Felix also will gather material from documents that have come up since the nomination, and in the judge’s two prior confirmation processes.
She also will research how the nomination process for a Supreme Court seat has evolved.
“It’s a very different process than it used to be,” Felix said, “and I think readers will find it really interesting to put this into a broader context.”
Felix doesn’t expect this book to be any more difficult that her previous ones, and she is looking forward to the challenge.
“They’ve certainly had their challenges in trying to get to sources, but I don’t think it’s going to be any more challenging,” she said. “The people I’m going to meet are really high profile people, and it will be fascinating.”
Felix wouldn’t reveal her deadline, but she did say it would be a challenging one.
“It’s really going to keep me on my toes,” she said.
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