Lisa Lucas | |
|---|---|
 Lisa Lucas in 2018 | |
| Born | Lisa Lucas 1980 (age 42–43) [1] New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Occupation | Executive director |
| Known for | National Book Foundation |
Lisa Lucas is senior vice president at Knopf Doubleday, and a former 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 who will oversee both Pantheon Books and Schocken Books. [5]
Montclair State University (MSU) is a public research university in Montclair, New Jersey, with parts of the campus extending into Clifton and into Little Falls. As of fall 2018, Montclair State was, by enrollment, the second largest public university in New Jersey. As of November 2021, there were 21,005 total enrolled students: 16,374 undergraduate students and 4,631 graduate students. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". The campus covers approximately 252 acres (1.02 km2). The university offers more than 300 majors, minors, and concentrations.
Doubleday is an American publishing company. It was founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897 and was the largest in the United States by 1947. It published the work of mostly U.S. authors under a number of imprints and distributed them through its own stores. In 2009, Doubleday merged with Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is now part of Penguin Random House. In 2019, the official website presents Doubleday as an imprint, not a publisher.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint with editorial independence. It is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is an American publishing house that was founded by and 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 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 changing 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 online magazine that publishes art, photography, fiction, and poetry from around the world, along with nonfiction such as letters from abroad, 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.
Daniela Gioseffi is a poet, novelist and performer who won the American Book Award in 1990 for Women on War; International Writings from Antiquity to the Present. She has published 16 books of poetry and prose and won a PEN American Center's Short Fiction prize (1995), and The John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry (2007).
Mary Melfi is a Canadian writer of Italian descent. She is a prolific poet, novelist, and playwright.
Marita Golden is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.
Penguin Random House LLC is an Anglo-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Group and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her debut novel Homegoing, published in 2016, won her, at the age of 26, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2016, Gyasi lives in Berkeley, California.
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.)