PublicAffairs Books good books about things that matter

Staff Directory SENIOR STAFF  |  FOUNDER'S NOTE

Susan Weinberg
PUBLISHER
Susan Weinberg was at HarperCollins Publishers for twelve years where, prior to leading the HarperCollins imprint, she directed the renowned HarperPerennial trade paperback program. During her tenure, she published many New York Times bestsellers and critically acclaimed books. In hardcover, these include Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh, Crimes Against Nature by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Sandy Koufax by Jane Leavy. Paperback titles include Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, What Went Wrong by Bernard Lewis, Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and PublicAffairs' own Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. Weinberg published a wide array of award-winning books including The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck (National Book Award winner, 2005), Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert Bix (Pulitzer Prize winner, 2001), and the paperback edition of the Pulitzer Prize winner A Problem From Hell by Samantha Power.

Peter Osnos
FOUNDER AND EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Between 1966-1984 Peter Osnos was a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and served as the newspaper's foreign and national editor. From 1984-1996 he was Vice President, Associate Publisher and senior editor at Random House and publisher of Random House's Times Books division. In 1997, he founded PublicAffairs, an independent publishing company specializing in books of journalism, history, biography and social criticism. He served as Publisher and CEO until 2005 and is now Founder and Editor-at-large. Among the authors he has published and or edited are; former President Jimmy Carter, Rosalyn Carter, Gen. Wesley Clark, Clark Clifford, former President Bill Clinton, Sam Donaldson, Dorothy Height, Molly Ivins, Vernon Jordan, Stanley Karnow, Wendy Kopp, Jim Lehrer, Scott McClellan, Robert McNamara, Charles Morris, Peggy Noonan, Barack Obama, Tip O’Neill, Nancy Reagan, Andy Rooney, Morley Safer, Natan Sharansky, George Soros, Donald Trump, Paul Volcker, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and Muhammad Yunus, as well as journalists from America’s leading publications and prominent scholars. Osnos has also been a commentator and host for National Public Radio and a contributor to publications including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. He has also served as Chair of the Trade Division of the Association of American Publishers and on the board of the Human Rights Watch. He is executive director of The Caravan Project, funded by the MacArthur and Carnegie Foundations, which is developing a plan for multi-platform publishing of books. He is Vice Chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review and is active in a number of other journalism and human rights organizations. Osnos writes a regular media column that is distributed by the Century Foundation (TCF.org), where he is a Senior Fellow. He is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations. He is a graduate of Brandeis and Columbia Universities. He lives in Greenwich, CT with his wife Susan, a consultant to human rights and philanthropic organizations.


Lisa Kaufman
MARKETING DIRECTOR AND SENIOR EDITOR
Lisa Kaufman directs PublicAffairs’ marketing, advertising, and promotion efforts while also acquiring and editing books. Books she has recently acquired and edited include What Happened by Scott McClellan, The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith, The Asian Mystique by Sheridan Prasso, Gusher of Lies by Robert Bryce, The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story by John Laurence, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Institution by Alex Beam, and Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson’s Disease by Morton Kondracke. Before joining PublicAffairs, Kaufman was Senior Manager of Promotion at Viking Penguin, where she also spent four years as an editor. Early in her career Kaufman worked as an intern for The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and as administrative assistant to writer James A. Michener. Her articles have appeared in The San Francisco Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor, New Texas, and other publications. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she lives in Brooklyn with her two daughters.

Robert Kimzey
MANAGING EDITOR, ASSISTANT PUBLISHER, PUBLICAFFAIRS
GROUP MANAGING EDITOR, VICE PRESIDENT, PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP

Robert Kimzey oversees the production of all PublicAffairs books and edits a select list of titles, including most recently, Lou Cannon's Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power and Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman's The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. Previously, he was Publications Director for Human Rights Watch, where he oversaw the production of approximately seventy reports a year; devised a sales strategy for the library and academic markets that quintupled the gross sales; reorganized the fulfillment and production departments; negotiated distribution deals in the U.S. and Europe; implemented a redesign of the reports; and established the organization's presence on the World Wide Web. Before Human Rights Watch he spent four years as an assistant editor in the trade division of Macmillan Publishing Company. For five years, he was the assistant coordinator for the New York University Summer Publishing Institute, of which he is a graduate. He completed his B.A. at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California in 1985.

Whitney Peeling
DIRECTOR OF PUBLICITY
Whitney Peeling joined PublicAffairs as Director of Publicity in December 2005 (taking the reins from PublicAffairs’ founding publicity director Gene Taft). Peeling was most recently Assistant Director of Publicity at Houghton Mifflin, where she handled the campaigns for many of Houghton’s leading non-fiction releases, including Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness, Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen, Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, and Richard Dawkins’s A Devil’s Chaplain and The Ancestor’s Tale. Born and raised in Allenwood, PA, Peeling began her publishing career as a publicity assistant in Houghton Mifflin’s New York office days after receiving her diploma from Columbia College. After holding the position of Associate Publicist at W.W. Norton, handling publicity for both debut fiction and nonfiction there, Peeling was invited back to Houghton Mifflin, where she graduated from Senior Publicist to Assistant Director over the next five years, collaborating with marketing, editorial, and sales to create effective campaigns for major house authors.

Clive Priddle
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR and vice president
Clive Priddle was until May 2003 publishing director of Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollins. Since joining PublicAffairs, the authors he has edited include Linda Robinson, Natan Sharansky, Kishore Mahbubani, John Kerry, David Rothkopf, Richard Haass, and Muhammad Yunus. He worked for Fourth Estate in the UK since 1992, where among the authors he acquired were Sebastian Junger, Laura Hillenbrand, David Ewing Duncan, James Naughtie, Francis Wheen, Geraldine Brooks, Oliver Morton, Eric Larson, and Michela Wrong. He previously worked for four years at Penguin UK. He won the Tony Godwin award in 2001. Born in London, a graduate of Cambridge University, Clive lives with his wife and two sons in northern Manhattan.



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