ABOUT TvS MEDIA GROUP

Founded in 2019, TvS Media Group LLC  is an award-winning boutique public relations,
marketing, and consulting firm specializing in book publishing, entertainment, and brand management,
with particular expertise in children's and young adult media. 

Photo credit: @tylercore

TRACY VAN STRAATEN, Founder and President

Founder and President Tracy van Straaten has more than 30 years of publicity, communications, and marketing experience, and she has crafted hundreds of campaigns for bestselling, award-winning, and debut authors, as well as beloved characters, celebrities, and brands.

Over the course of her career, she has directed PR campaigns and strategy for more than 200 New York Times bestsellers, including all five books in Suzanne Collins’s bestselling The Hunger Games series; He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo; Olivia by Ian Falconer; and the re-launch of the Eloise series by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, for which van Straaten received a Literary Marketplace (LMP) Award for publicity campaign. Her longstanding press and industry relationships and vast network of national contacts across all media platforms have resulted in a consistent track record of high-profile placements. In 2023, TvS Media Group was awarded a Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Chicago Skyline Award of Excellence and a Publicity Club of Chicago Golden Trumpet Award for the media campaign for the 30th Anniversary of Goosebumps by R.L. Stine.

Tracy van Straaten has held publicity and marketing positions at Little, Brown and Company, HarperCollins, William Morrow, Simon & Schuster, and, from 2006-2019, was Vice President of Communications, Publicity, and Educational Marketing for the Scholastic Trade publishing division. She currently serves on the Advisory Council for The Maurice Sendak Foundation and the Chicago Public Library Foundation's Ambassador Circle and previously served on the boards of the Children’s Book Council and The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. She holds a B.A. in English and Art History from Hamilton College, earned a master's degree in Children’s Literature from Simmons University in Boston, and received the Simmons University Alumni Achievement Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature in 2017. 

Photo credit: Courtesy Noreen Herits

NOREEN HERITS, Vice President, Publicity

Noreen Herits will join TvS Media Group as Vice President in June 2026, bringing more than 20 years of marketing & publicity experience specializing in children’s books. She joins from Random House Children’s Books, where she was Vice President, Executive Director of Publicity and Media Strategy.

Herits has led high-impact campaigns for bestselling and high-profile authors and public figures, including President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Paul McCartney, Hilary Duff, Yuval Noah Harari, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sandra Boynton, Markus Zusak, Ruby Bridges, Jason Segel, Danica McKellar, Erin A. Craig, and K.L. Walther, among many others. Her work spans dozens of New York Times bestselling titles and series, including American Royals, The Book Thief, Magic Tree House, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Immortal Consequences, and The Bench. She has executed hundreds of events over the course of her career, as well as orchestrated large-scale event partnerships with Girl Scouts of the USA for First Lady Michelle Obama’s Becoming: Adapted for Young Readers and Kristen Bell’s The World Needs More Purple People.

In response to COVID, she also created a multi-year virtual summer events program with the Story Pirates that connected young readers with authors and illustrators. Herits brings deep experience in brand and licensed publishing, working in partnership with Disney, Sesame Street, Little Golden Books, National Geographic, Brain Quest, American Ballet Theater, and more.

Previously, she was Director of Children’s Publicity and Marketing at Workman Publishing and began her career at Penguin Books. She lives in the Hudson Valley (NY) with her husband and two children.

Photo credit: Sita Kelly

MELISSA BLOOMFIELD, Publicity Director

Publicity Director Melissa Bloomfield began her career in book publicity in 2002 working for a boutique PR firm in New York City after attending the NYU Summer Publishing Institute. She subsequently held publicist positions at McGraw-Hill and Scholastic in New York before moving to Atlanta in 2007 where she led the publicity department at Peachtree Publishing, an independent children's book publisher, until 2013.

Bloomfield then founded an award-winning wedding and event planning firm in Atlanta that was consistently chosen as a Wedding Wire Couple’s Choice award winner and featured widely in wedding blogs and magazines. In 2019, after returning from two years living in Mexico City, she established a robust events program for the independent children's bookstore, Brave + Kind Bookshop, where she managed author appearances. 

Bloomfield joined TvS Media Group in 2021 where she has worked on publicity campaigns and planned events for bestselling authors including Jeff Kinney, Todd Parr, Lance Bass, Dara Horn, Joy Harjo, Barbara Kingsolver, M.T. Anderson, Rajani LaRocca, Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and more. 

She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children. 

Photo credit: Varya Bazalev

HANNAH BOARDMAN, Senior Publicist

Hannah Boardman first joined TvS Media Group in 2021 as an intern during her final year of college. Since joining TvS Media Group full-time in 2022, Boardman has worked on publicity campaigns for bestselling and award-winning authors including Amber McBride (The Leaving Room), Dan Gutman (20th Anniversary of My Weird School), Barbara Dee, Adam Wallace, Maria Scrivan (Nat Enough series), Ruth Spiro (10th Anniversary of Baby Loves Science), Alyssa Satin Capucilli (30th Anniversary of Biscuit), and more. She graduated from DePaul University's College of Communications in 2022, where she received the department's 2022 PR Student of the Year Award. Originally from Minnesota, Hannah Boardman lives and works in Chicago.

Photo credit: Vin Rouge  

DEBRA LINN, Marketing Director

Debra Linn joined TvS Media Group in 2025 as Marketing Director. Debra was Marketing Director at Algonquin Books, the award-winning imprint that specializes in accessible literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, where she worked from 2012 to 2024, and developed its digital marketing, social media, and ambassador programs. She created the viral, multi-platform social engagement and marketing campaign for Dan Rather’s What Unites Us that propelled the three-year-old title onto the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for 10 weeks. For sister imprint Algonquin Young Readers, Debra developed the campaign for instant New York Times bestseller The Ogress & the Orphans by Newbery Medal winner Kelly Barnhill. She also executed marketing campaigns for bestselling authors, including Gabrielle Zevin, Tayari Jones, Amy Stewart, Lee Smith, Bonnie Tsui, Lauren Grodstein, and National Medal of Arts winner Julia Alvarez.

Prior to Debra’s tenure at Algonquin, she was Events & Marketing Director at Books & Books, the acclaimed independent bookstores in South Florida, and guided hundreds of events for children and book clubs each year. And before that, Debra worked as a newspaper sports editor at The Miami Herald and Chicago Tribune. Originally from Miami Beach, she now lives and works in Durham, NC.

CONTACT US