Lisa Lucas | |
|---|---|
 Lucas in 2018 | |
| Born | Lisa Lucas 1980 (age 43–44) [1] New York City, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Occupation | Executive director |
| Known for | National Book Foundation |
Lisa Lucas (born 1980) is an American publishing executive. From 2020 to 2024, she was senior vice president at Knopf Doubleday, and from 2016 to 2020 she was executive director of the National Book Foundation. [2]
Lucas was born in New York City in 1980 [1] and grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey and Montclair, New Jersey. [3] [4] [5] Lucas's father is musician Reggie Lucas, a Grammy-winning songwriter and producer. [6]
Lucas attended the University of Chicago, where she studied English. [4] She graduated in 2001. [7]
Lucas began her career as a 15-year-old intern at Vibe magazine; at 17 she worked for radio station KIIS-FM. [4] After college, Lucas worked for Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, then the Tribeca Film Festival. [8] In 2012, Lucas became publisher of arts magazine Guernica . [9]
Reporting on Lucas's 2016 appointment to executive director of the National Book Foundation, [10] NBC said: "With Lucas at the forefront of the National Book Foundation and Awards, the future of publishing looks very bright." [11] The Los Angeles Times said Lucas "is clearly poised to bring the organization to a new level...ideally suited" to promote the foundation. She is the third director in the history of the foundation, "one of America’s key literary institutions," [12] and the first woman and the first African-American to lead the organization. [13] As executive director, she has publicly discussed the importance of inclusivity in publishing and reaching young readers. [14]
In July 2020, Lucas was named by Knopf Doubleday as a senior vice president to serve as publisher of both Pantheon Books and Schocken Books. [5] In her time in these roles, Lucas published Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All Stars (a National Book Award finalist), signed LeVar Burton to a two-book deal, and was the first Black publisher for Pantheon, an 80-year-old imprint. [15] In May 2024, Lucas and Reagan Arthur were removed from their roles at the company as part of cost-cutting. [15] [16]
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the following decades, a series of acquisitions made it into one of the largest publishers in the United States. In 2013, it was merged with Penguin Group to form Penguin Random House, which is owned by the Germany-based media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Penguin Random House uses its brand for Random House Publishing Group and Random House Children's Books, as well as several imprints.
Doubleday is an American publishing company. It was founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897. By 1947, it was the largest book publisher in the United States. It published the work of mostly U.S. authors under a number of imprints and distributed them through its own stores.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint. Founded in 1942 as an independent publishing house in New York City by Kurt and Helen Wolff, it specialized in introducing progressive European works to American readers. In 1961, it was acquired by Random House, and André Schiffrin was hired as executive editor, who continued to publish important works, by both European and American writers, until he was forced to resign in 1990 by Random House owner Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. and president Alberto Vitale. Several editors resigned in protest, and multiple Pantheon authors including Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Barbara Ehrenreich held a protest outside Random House. In 1998, Bertelsmann purchased Random House, and the imprint has undergone a number of corporate restructurings since then. It is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group under Penguin Random House.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is an American publishing house that was founded by Blanche Knopf and Alfred A. Knopf Sr. in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in addition to leading American literary trends. It was acquired by Random House in 1960, and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group division of Penguin Random House which is owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Kevin Young is an American poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Sheryl WuDunn is an American business executive, writer, lecturer, and Pulitzer Prize winner.
Reginald Grant Lucas was an American guitarist, songwriter and record producer. Lucas is perhaps best known for producing the majority of Madonna's 1983 self-titled debut album, and for playing rhythm guitar with the Miles Davis electric band during the first half of the 1970s.
Ajai Singh "Sonny" Mehta was a British and American editor. Mehta was the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Deirdre Bair was an American literary scholar and biographer. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981.
The Crown Publishing Group is a subsidiary of Penguin Random House that publishes across several fiction and non-fiction categories. Originally founded in 1933 as a remaindered books wholesaler called Outlet Book Company, the firm expanded into publishing original content in 1936 under the Crown name, and was acquired by Random House in 1988. Under Random House's ownership, the Crown Publishing Group was operated as an independent division until 2018, when it was merged with the rest of Random House's adult programs.
Salman Schocken or Shlomo Zalman Schocken was a German Jewish publisher, and co-founder of the large Kaufhaus Schocken chain of department stores in Germany. Stripped of his citizenship and forced to sell his company by the German government, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1934, where he purchased the newspaper Haaretz.
The National Book Foundation (NBF) is an American nonprofit organization established with the goal "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America." Established in 1989 by National Book Awards, Inc., the foundation is the administrator and sponsor of the National Book Awards, a set of literary awards inaugurated in 1936 and continuous from 1950. It also organizes and sponsors public and educational programs.
Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics is an American online magazine that publishes art, photography, fiction, and poetry, along with nonfiction such as letters, investigative pieces, and opinion pieces on international affairs and U.S. domestic policy. It also publishes interviews and profiles of artists, writers, musicians, and political figures.
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Penguin Random House LLC is a British-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. It has more than 300 publishing imprints. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers.
Katherine McNamara is a writer, editor, and digital publisher in Charlottesville, Virginia. She grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania. While pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Cornell, she went to Paris on a French-government research fellowship, researching the thought of the French ethnologue Marcel Mauss. From Paris she moved to Alaska, where she lived and wrote for many years; she developed an interest in Native languages and linguistics that continues to this day. She moved to New York in the late 1980s, and in 1989 began writing her 2001 book, Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska. After her husband's death in 1994, she moved to Charlottesville, and soon after began her digital publication Archipelago. Today she is publisher and editor of Artist's Proof Editions.
David Steinberger is an American businessman, publishing executive, current Chairman of the National Book Foundation, and Executive Chairman of Open Road Integrated Media Inc. His career has involved the acquisition, management and sale of a number of publishers and publishing-related companies as well as the application of digital technologies to publishing companies. He previously was CEO of Arcadia Publishing and CEO of the Perseus Books Group, following leadership roles at HarperCollins. In January 2021 he announced a succession plan at Arcadia, handing over day-to-day management to a successor and moving to Arcadia's board of directors. In December 2021, Steinberger led an investor group in the acquisition of Open Road Integrated Media inc., which utilizes data science technology to market eBooks, with Steinberger being named Executive Chairman, along with the role of CEO to be added in January 2022.
Dan Frank was an American editorial director at Pantheon Books.
June 22, 2020...Lucas, 40, who is the executive director of the National Book Foundation...her mother, Kay Lucas wrote (This was written when you were being born. It's about you.)