Nancy Paulsen Books launched its first hardcover list in Fall 2011. The imprint publishes fifteen books a year and focuses on eye-opening, often funny picture books and fiction from diverse and distinct voices, especially stories that are inventive and emotionally satisfying. These are the kinds of books that are adopted by book clubs and that appear on state lists, generated by the votes of children.
Nancy Paulsen has been with Penguin her entire career, starting as an assistant at Viking Children’s Books, where many of the books she edited have established themselves as classics, including Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London, I Like Me by Nancy Carlson, and Horrible Harry by Suzy Kline. As publisher of Puffin Books, she published authors Roald Dahl, Gary Paulsen, and Mildred Taylor. As publisher of Putnam she edited three Newbery Honor winners by Jacqueline Woodson, Show Way, Feathers and After Tupac and D Foster; Newbery Honor-winning Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer; Coretta Scott King Honor-winning The Road To Paris by Nikki Grimes; and National Book Award finalist Where I Want to Be by Adele Griffin. Classic picture books she edited at Putnam include The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson and E. B. Lewis, Fireboat by Maira Kalman, and Leaves by David Ezra Stein.