#Lisa Lucas takes senior VP role at Penguin Random House

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Lisa Lucas attends the 70th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner in 2019.
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Penguin Random House has tapped Lisa Lucas to be the new senior VP and publisher of its Pantheon and Schocken Books imprints, marking the second time in recent weeks that a major book publisher tapped an African-American woman to head an imprint.

Dana Canedy had become the first black woman to ever head the flagship Simon & Schuster’s prestigious namesake imprint, which is in the process of being divested by its parent company Viacom.

Both of the new publishers were outsiders to the book publishing industry. Canedy, a former New York Times reporter, was the administrator for the Pulitzer Prizes when she was tapped. Lucas is the current executive director of the National Book Foundation.

“Wouldn’t it have been nice if it happened naturally over 20 years,” Lucas said in an interview with Media Ink, noting that women and people of color have been landing top jobs this year in a business that had been run overwhelmingly by white men.

But she said part of the problem was always that people tended to stay in publishing jobs for years.

“Before you had the significant passing of [Knopf’s] Sonny Mehta and [Simon & Schuster’s] Carolyn Reidy and [Randon House’s] Susan Kamil there was no place to put anyone,” she said. Her immediate boss, Regan Arthur, was only named to replace the late and legendary Sonny Mehta in January.

When Lucas assumes the new roll in January, she will inherit a veteran staff of editors. She said her arrival is likely to be “more evolution than revolution. I think having a fresh set of eyes is good for any business. All I want is more readers, and the kind of books that reflect the world we live in.”

Lucas, before her three-year stint leading the nonprofit foundation that hands out the coveted National Book Awards, was the publisher of the online art and literary magazine Guernica from 2012 to 2016 and before that was the director of the Tribeca Film Institute.

She will take up her new post in January and step down from the Foundation In December. During her tenure at the National Book Foundation, she is credited with introducing a new annual award for translated literature and for bestowing lifetime achievement awards to John Lewis, Ibram X. Kendi, Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, Masha Gessen and Robert Caro and for distributing 1.4 million books to young readers in public housing projects.

“The future feels very bright for books,” she said. “When we’re confused or sad or in need of distraction or enlightenment, books are what we trust.”