Penguin Press

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Overview

Penguin Press was founded in 2003 by Ann Godoff and launched its debut list in the Winter of 2004. Dedicated to publishing quality nonfiction and literary fiction, Penguin Press seeks to publish ideas that matter, storytelling that lasts, and books that don’t just start conversations, but detonate them. Since its creation, they have published numerous New York Times and national bestsellers, won four National Book Critics Circle awards, one National Book Award, and five Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2016. Books from Penguin Press have also earned prestigious prizes and citations such as the James Beard Award, the Orange Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Man Asian Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Arthur Ross Book Award, the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, and the Financial Times Goldman Sachs Business Book Award.

Penguin Press publishes a diverse list of historians, scientists, novelists, politicians, poets, artists, photographers, and some of the most respected thinkers in the world, including: Jonathan Haidt, Ron Chernow, Michael Pollan, Zadie Smith, Mary Oliver, Thomas Pynchon, Emily Oster, Ocean Vuong, Will Smith, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, David Axelrod, Maira Kalman, Steve Coll, Dan Barber, Daniel Yergin, Alexandra Fuller, Philip Gourevitch, Steve Inskeep, Liaquat Ahmed, Ingrid Betancourt, Roger Lowenstein, Joshua Foer, Franklin Foer, William Finnegan, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Mark Harris, John Lewis Gaddis, Tony Judt, Alan Greenspan, Al Gore, Aziz Ansari, Phil Jackson, Bryan Burrough, Errol Morris, Gordon S. Wood, Yvon Chouinard, Barton Gellman, Dave Isay, Jon Lee Anderson, Krista Tippett, Michael V. Hayden, Ottessa Moshfegh, Leon Panetta, Celeste Ng, Nate Silver, Pamela Druckerman, Alice Waters, Admiral James Stavridis, Richard Haass, Maria Konnikova, Carolyn Forche, Philip Rucker, Carol Leonnig, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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View our Spring 2025 catalog here.

View our Summer 2025 catalog here.

View our Fall 2024 catalog here.

Meet the Team

Ann Godoff, President and Editor-in-Chief

Ann Godoff is President and Editor-in-Chief of Penguin Press, which she founded in 2003. She has had a distinguished and singular career in book publishing, editing and publishing many award-winning and bestselling works of fiction and nonfiction. She first joined the editorial department of Simon & Schuster in 1980, and in 1987 became  Senior Editor at Atlantic Monthly Press; in two years she became Editor-in-Chief. In 1991, Ms. Godoff was appointed Executive Editor at Random House, where she would eventually be named Vice President and Editorial Director. In 1997 she became President, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of the Random House Trade Publishing Group and Executive Vice President of Random House, Inc.

Scott Moyers-by Harvey Wang-small2

Scott Moyers, Vice President and Publisher

Scott Moyers is Vice President and Publisher of Penguin Press. He began his career in Doubleday’s editorial department, where he worked from 1991 to 1995 before moving to Scribner as Associate Editor. In 1998, Mr. Moyers joined Ann Godoff at Random House, where he rose to the position of Senior Editor. Mr. Moyers then joined Ms. Godoff for the founding of Penguin Press in 2003. Four years later, Mr. Moyers was appointed Director of the New York office of the Wylie Agency; he returned to Penguin Press in 2011 as Publisher.

Sarah Hutson, VP, Director of Publicity

Sarah Hutson is Vice President, Director of Publicity at Penguin Press.  She joined Penguin Press in 2004 after having worked in publicity at Henry Holt & Company and Vintage Books

Matt Boyd, VP, Associate Publisher, Director of Marketing

Matthew Boyd is the VP, Associate Publisher, and Director of Marketing at Penguin Press. He has been with Penguin since 2005 and has previously worked at Riverhead Books, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and in Penguin corporate.

Virginia Smith Younce, Vice President, Executive Editor

Virginia Smith Younce is Vice President and Executive Editor of Penguin Press. She began her career in book publishing at Simon & Schuster in 2006, and in 2008 was named Associate Editor at Ecco/HarperCollins. She joined Penguin Press in 2009.

John Burnham Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of six acclaimed novels, including The Red Daughter, The Commoner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. A recipient of a Lyndhurst Prize for mastery in the art of fiction, his books have been translated into twenty languages, and he has done extensive screen and television writing, including as screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, for which he was nominated for a 2018 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Writing. The longtime Literary Director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, Schwartz is also Editor-at-Large at Penguin Press, as well as host and co-producer of the literary podcast Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in New York City with his wife, writer Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son Garrick.

William Heyward, Executive Editor

William Heyward is an Executive Editor at Penguin Press, where he acquires and edits a wide range of nonfiction and literary fiction. The authors he has edited and published include Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, James Shapiro, Jonathan Blitzer, Salvatore Scibona, Joshua Wong, Joana Avillez, Molly Young, Wolfram Eilenberger, Adrienne Raphel, Bo Seo, Yaroslav Trofimov, Elias Muhanna, A. C. Grayling, Henry Grabar, Sam Knight, Mariana Mazzucato, Rosamund Young, and Werner Herzog. He previously worked in the editorial department of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kiara Barrow, Senior Editor

Kiara Barrow is a Senior Editor at Penguin Press, where she returned in 2022. She is also co-founder and co-editor of The Drift.

Juli Kiyan, Editor and Associate Director of Publicity

Juli Kiyan is an Editor and Associate Director of Publicity at Penguin Press. She began her career at Scribner and joined Penguin Press in 2011 as a publicist. In 2020, her role expanded to acquire and edit titles.

Casey Denis, Editor

Casey Denis is an Editor at Penguin Press. She began her career in publishing at McGraw-Hill, and joined Penguin Press as an Editorial Assistant in 2015.

Mia Council, Editor

Mia Council started at Penguin Press in 2017. Her list includes Acceptance: A Memoir by Emi Nietfeld, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold, and My First Book by Honor Levy. She is a graduate of Smith College and the Columbia Publishing Course and is a Virginia native. She largely acquires nonfiction, and some of her favorite books as a reader are Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, and Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant.

Helen Rouner, Editor

Helen Rouner is an Editor at Penguin Press, which she joined in 2021. Her list includes books by Spencer Ackerman, Lauren Christensen, Michael Clune, Mark Ford, and Ernest Freeberg, and she works on the Significations series curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She is a graduate of Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and the Columbia Publishing Course, and her writing has appeared online in The Paris Review. She lives in her hometown of Brooklyn.

Caroline Sydney, Associate Editor

Caroline Sydney is an Associate Editor at Penguin Press. Previously, she was an Editorial Assistant at Other Press and joined Penguin Press in 2017.

Natalie Coleman, Assistant Editor

Natalie Coleman is an Assistant Editor and joined Penguin Press in 2021. She is a graduate of the NYU Journalism Institute’s Literary Reportage program and lives in Brooklyn. She is interested in acquiring primarily nonfiction, especially journalism, cultural criticism, history, and memoir.