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Staff Directory SENIOR STAFF  |  FOUNDER'S NOTE

Susan Weinberg
GROUP PUBLISHER, BASIC BOOKS * NATION BOOKS * PUBLICAFFAIRS
Susan Weinberg joined PublicAffairs as Publisher in 2005. Under Susan’s leadership PublicAffairs had two #1 New York Times Bestsellers with Scott McClellan’s What Happened and Participant Media’s Waiting for Superman. Awards winners during her tenure include: Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics, winner of the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year; Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction; and Charles Morris’s Trillion Dollar Meltdown, winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Financial and Business Journalism. Previously, she was at HarperCollins Publishers for twelve years where she led the flagship HarperCollins imprint as well as the HarperPerennial 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, 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. She holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MBA from Columbia University.

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, Paul Farmer, 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.

Clive Priddle
PUBLISHER

Clive Priddle joined PublicAffairs as executive editor in 2003. In 2006, he became Editorial Director.  Since joining PublicAffairs, the authors he has edited include Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Linda Robinson, Natan Sharansky, Kishore Mahbubani, John Kerry, David Rothkopf, Richard Haass, and Muhammad Yunus. Prior to that, he was publishing director of Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollins, 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.

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 acquired and edited include the #1 New York Times bestseller What Happened by Scott McClellan; The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith; Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary; Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” by Robert Bryce; Sarah from Alaska by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe; and Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life by Bill Minutaglio & W. Michael Smith. Before joining PublicAffairs, Kaufman was Senior Manager of Promotion at Viking Penguin, where she also spent four years as an editor. Earlier in her career Kaufman worked as an intern for The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and as administrative assistant to writer James A. Michener. She taught the advanced fiction writing workshop for The Writers Studio in New York from 1989 until 2000. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she lives in Manhattan with her partner, Peter Deri, a psychoanalyst, and two daughters.

Melissa Raymond
MANAGING EDITOR

Melissa Raymond first came to PublicAffairs in the summer of 2000 as a part-time, temporary employee. She never forgot the fond memories she had of the publishing experience and, when the opportunity presented itself in 2005, came back to PublicAffairs full-time. Raymond worked her way up from Production Editor to Assistant Managing Editor to Managing Editor, and now oversees the production process of PublicAffairs’ full list of titles. She has worked on books by Muhammad Yunus (Creating a World Without Poverty and Building Social Business), George Soros (The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, The Crash of 2008 and What it Means, and The Soros Lectures), Participant Media (Food, Inc. and Waiting for “Superman”), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters), the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report), and many more. Raymond graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Journalism and moved to New York to attend the Manhattan School of Music, where she received her Master’s in Opera Performance. She continues to perform professionally whenever she has the opportunity.

Jaime Leifer
DIRECTOR OF PUBLICITY

Jaime Leifer returned to PublicAffairs as Director of Publicity in February 2010. She was most recently Public Relations Manager at The New Yorker, where she handled media coverage for the magazine and worked with a wide range of writers, including Seymour M. Hersh, Malcolm Gladwell, George Packer, Jane Mayer, Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth Kolbert, and James Surowiecki. Leifer began her career in publishing at PublicAffairs, signing on as a publicity assistant in August 2001, immediately after moving to New York. Over the course of the next six years, she rose through the ranks to Publicity Manager, leading the campaigns of books ranging from Marjorie Williams’s The Woman at the Washington Zoo and Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa to Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s The Accidental President of Brazil and Jeremy Paxman’s On Royalty. A Massachusetts native, Leifer graduated from Harvard University and attended the Columbia Publishing Course. She still lives on the Upper West Side.
 



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