About Us

A Note from Clive Priddle

PublicAffairs was founded by Peter Osnos with a mission to embody “standards, values, and flair.” More directly, Peter issued to us a challenge: to publish “Good Books About Things that Matter”—a guiding principle we happily retain.

From the start, PublicAffairs authors have been at the heart of the national and global conversation, and their books have served to inform, advocate, educate, debunk, and speak truth to power. Over more than 25 years we have been fortunate to welcome onto our lists four Nobel Prize winners, and three Presidential Medal of Freedom winners, as well as winners of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, and Pulitzer Prize-winners. We publish many national bestsellers, pioneering investigative reporters, business innovators, cutting-edge economists, skeptics, enthusiasts, and brilliantly compelling writers across many disciplines and sometimes entirely outside them.

We take our inspiration from this noisy, sometimes raucous, always inspiring group, and renew our commitment to support and sustain them with every book we publish.


Staff Directory

Clive Priddle

Publisher

Email: clive.priddle@hbgusa.com

Clive Priddle joined PublicAffairs as executive editor in 2003. He became Editorial Director in 2006, and Publisher in 2012. 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.

Jaime Leifer

VP, Associate Publisher and Director of Publicity

Email: jaime.leifer@hbgusa.com

Jaime Leifer was named VP, Associate Publisher in December 2014. She returned to PublicAffairs as Director of Publicity in February 2010 from 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 lives in Brooklyn.

Lindsay Fradkoff

Marketing Director

Email: lindsay.fradkoff@hbgusa.com

Lindsay Fradkoff was named Marketing Director in December 2014. She has worked on promotional campaigns for Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning, and bestselling titles including Disrupt Aging by JoAnn Jenkins, Black Mass by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, and Food, Inc. edited by Karl Weber. Prior to joining PublicAffairs, she worked in sales and marketing at Barefoot Books and Beacon Press. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Colleen Lawrie

Editorial Director

Email: colleen.lawrie@hbgusa.com

Colleen Lawrie joined PublicAffairs in 2015. She acquires in the areas of business, politics, history, and social justice. She has published the New York Times bestsellers The Storm Before the Storm and Hero of Two Worlds by the popular history podcaster Mike Duncan, Buyer Aware by the president and CEO of Consumer Reports Marta Tellado, The New Climate War and Our Fragile Moment by renowned climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, and For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be, by acclaimed marketer and cultural translator Dr. Marcus Collins, among others. She is an obsessive podcast consumer who loves obscure trivia and bad puns. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and son.

Anu Roy-Chaudhury

Associate Editor

Email: anupama.roy-chaudhury@hbgusa.com

Anu Roy-Chaudhury joined PublicAffairs in 2019 and currently acquires for both PublicAffairs and Bold Type Books. Her areas of interest include social and cultural histories, blends of memoir and biography and works by underrepresented voices and backgrounds. She has worked with authors Craig Seligman, Tara Isabella Burton, Moshik Temkin, Sarah Scoles and Patrick Winn. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and began her publishing career as an intern here at PublicAffairs in the summer of 2018. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.



Peter Osnos

Founder

Peter Osnos began his journalism career in 1965 as an assistant to I. F. .Stone on his weekly newsletter. Between 1966–1984 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. He served as Publisher and CEO until 2005 and continues as a consulting editor and Founder.

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, Paul Farmer, Earvin (Magic) Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Sam Donaldson, Kenneth Feinberg, Annette Gordon Reed, Meg Greenfield, Dorothy Height, Don Hewitt, Molly Ivins, Vernon Jordan, Ward Just, Stanley Karnow, Wendy Kopp, Charles Krauthammer, Brian Lamb, Jim Lehrer, Scott McClellan, Robert McNamara, Charles Morris, Peggy Noonan, William Novak, Roger Mudd. Former President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Nancy Reagan, Andy Rooney, Morley Safer, Natan Sharansky, George Soros, Susan Swain, President Donald Trump, Paul Volcker, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and Nobel peace prize Winner 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 AffairsThe Atlantic, and The New Republic. He wrote the Platform column for the Century Foundation, the Daily Beast and The Atlantic.com from 2006-2014. He has also served as Chair of the Trade Division of the Association of American Publishers and on the board of Human Rights Watch. From 2005-2009, he was executive director of The Caravan Project, funded by the MacArthur and Carnegie Foundations, which developed a plan for multi-platform publishing of books. He was the Vice-Chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review from  2007-2012. He is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations. He is an adjunct professor at Hunter College in the human rights program. He is a graduate of Brandeis and Columbia Universities.

He lives in New York City, with his wife Susan, a consultant to human rights and philanthropic organizations. His children are Evan L.R. Osnos and Katherine Sanford. There are five grandchildren.

Contact Us

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Phone: 212-364-1100

For general and publicity inquiries, please contact PEmail@hbgusa.com

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