Oprah Winfrey and Frank Sinatra biographer Kitty Kelley has landed a book deal to write about the women of the U.S. Senate. Publication has been set for Spring 2016.

The book will look at the 113th Congress, but focus on the “divinely diverse and one-fifth female” U.S. Senate. WSK Management CEO Wayne Kabak negotiated the deal with publisher Jamie Raab. Raab will also edit the book.

Kelley explained in the release: “As a woman who cheers the accomplishments of other women on both sides of the aisle, I come to this project with a positive bias, and I am eager to learn if the combined talents and collegiality of women will make a difference in the way our laws are made and the country’s business is conducted. More importantly, through in-depth reporting I will try to answer the question that so many are asking: can the presence of women break the ugly gridlock now choking Congress?”

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TV host and author Stephen Colbert has inked a book deal with Grand Central Publishing for his children’s book, I Am a Pole (and So Can You!). Publication is set for May 8, 2012.

Here’s more from the publisher: “The book came about as a result of a two-part interview that Stephen Colbert did last month with legendary children’s book author, Maurice Sendak, on The Colbert Report. During the interview, Colbert gave viewers a preview of a children’s book he was in the midst of writing. The interview went viral and immediately became an internet sensation, with fans clamoring for copies of the book.”

Colbert quipped in the release: “It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to write a children’s book. I hope the minutes you and your loved ones spend reading it are as fulfilling as the minutes I spent writing it.” Trident Media Group CEO Dan Strone and Dixon Talent agent James Dixon negotiated the deal with Grand Central publisher Jamie Raab.

GalleyCat contributor Jeff Rivera interviewed Grand Central publisher Jamie Raab for mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? feature today.

In the interview, Raab (pictured, via) defended her imprint’s standard practice of giving authors a 25% royalty rate for eBooks: “We have an infrastructure to support.” She outlined the values of what traditional publishers have to offer whether they are new in their writing career or established New York Times bestselling authors.

When asked on whether or not she fears big-name writers will take a less traditional publishing route, she replied: “I think about that a lot because I know it’s on authors’ minds. And I think it’s incumbent on every publisher to do a better job than they’ve ever done before — more creative on marketing and eBooks, working in partnership more closely with their authors, keeping them in the loop, publishing more strategically.”

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Grand Central Publishing will publish a “remarkable collaboration” between photographer Terry Richardson and Lady Gaga. Coming out November 22, Lady Gaga will feature 350 photographs by Richardson and an introduction by Lady Gaga (pictured, via).

Working in association with Atom Factory, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment negotiated the deal with publisher Jamie Raab. The publisher billed the book as a “visual dialogue” between the pop star and the photographer–Richardson has snapped 100,000 images of Gaga.

Here’s more from the release: “the book will showcase over 350 color and black and white photographs taken during the 10 month period in which Richardson followed Lady Gaga and had complete access to her everyday life, with nothing being off limits. Beginning with Lollapalooza in August 2010 to the February 2011 Grammy Awards which had 26.66 million viewers, (the highest viewership in over a decade) to the final shows of her Monster Ball tour which averaged an attendance of 90,000 people each day, Richardson brilliantly captures the intimate, random, behind-the-scenes moments of Lady Gaga in both her professional and personal life.”

Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central Publishing division will publish The Family Corleone, a prequel to Mario Puzo‘s The Godfather. Ed Falco wrote the novel, drawing inspiration from an unproduced screenplay by the late novelist.

Publication is set for June 2012. The book will explore Depression-era New York City, revealing “unknown history of how Vito Corleone fought to survive in the brutal criminal underworld to become the influential and respected Don in The Godfather.”

In the release, the novelist’s son Tony Puzo said the upcoming book will be “true to Mario Puzo’s legacy.” Grand Central publisher Jamie Raab added: “This is the novel that Godfather fans have been waiting for.”

Les Pockell, the former associate publisher and vice president at Grand Central Publishing, passed away at 68-years-old.

Before moving to Warner Books–the imprint that would later become Grand Central–Pockell had worked at St. Martin’s Press, Doubleday, and Book-of-the-Month Club. He edited a variety of books, from The 101 Greatest Business Principles of All Time to the mysteries of Donald Westlake to the children’s work of John Lithgow. Slice Magazine has a comic tribute to his encyclopedic knowledge about the world.

Here’s more from the AP: “Grand Central publisher and executive vice president Jamie Raab said she liked to call him ‘The Professor’ because Pockell knew so much about so many subjects and would become visibly animated in discussion, his hands ‘flailing’ everywhere.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

As real life conservative figures cash in with book deals, a comedian who plays a conservative has landed another book deal. Television host Stephen Colbert has sold an unnamed follow-up to I Am America (And So Can You!) to Grand Central, according to Publishers Marketplace.

It is scheduled for a 2012 release, just in time for another historic election. According to the subscription-only publishing site, the deal was negotiated by Dan Strone from Trident Media Group and James Dixon from Dixon Talent. Colbert’s first book spent weeks on top of the NY Times bestseller list. The book may give the comedian a chance to fulfill another goal as well. While promoting I Am America, Colbert gathered more than 14,700 petitioning to get his book on Oprah’s Book Club.

Here’s an excerpt: “[Y]our book club has a troubling record. So far, you’ve given your implicit endorsement to liars, hermaphrodites, the apocalypse, and, in honoring Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fidel Castro. All of which are actively plotting to destroy America. Isn’t it about time you chose a book that cared about this nation?”

Following the pop star’s tragic death last week, Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central Publishing will reprint J. Randy Taraborrelli‘s out-of-print biography on Michael Jackson.

The U.S. edition will include updates about the last five years of the singer’s life, and carry an updated title: “Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness, the Whole Story, 1958-2009.” Publication is set for July, and Macmillan UK will reprint the book in the UK.

Here’s a statement from Jamie Raab, Executive VP and Publisher of Grand Central Publishing: “If anyone should have the final word on Michael Jackson, it should be Randy, who has documented accurately his career almost from day one. This book stands as the classic biography on Jackson, and readers have been requesting this updated edition.”

The New York Times’ Julie Bosman has the scoop on the long-awaited name change for Warner Books: as of now (with an official launch at Book Expo in early June) the Hachette imprint will be known as Grand Central Publishing – a move happening just in time for the company to switch offices from the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue to 237 Park Avenue, closer to the famous train station. “I was very nervous,” Jamie Raab, the publisher of Warner Books, said in a telephone interview with Bosman. “It’s like suddenly being told that not only are you being sold, but you have to give up the name you’ve lived with your whole life.”

After trying on a host of names for size, Grand Central Publishing, Raab said, conveyed the company’s wide range of readers and the many genres it publishes. It pointedly omits the word “books,” a gesture to electronic and other emerging forms of publishing that go beyond ink and paper. The first books to carry the Grand Central Publishing imprint are expected to be on the fall 2007 list, which includes a novel by David Baldacci, a memoir by Rosie O’Donnell and a graphic novel by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman. And the new logo is music to Raab’s ears. “I hated it,” she said of the bulky “W” logo hearkening back to the imprint’s creation in 1970. “It’s a period piece. It probably looked really good in the ’70s.”