Judy Clain, Senior Vice President and Publisher, Summit Books

Judy Clain joined Summit Books in January of 2024. She was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, and immigrated to New York City in 1979. She started her career in the Rights Department at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She spent a decade in the movie business as an agent at Triad Artists, selling film rights of books, and then as a production executive at Sony/Mandalay Entertainment. She joined Little, Brown and Company in 1998 and was named Editor-in-Chief in 2011. In addition to managing the editorial team, some of the books Judy edited at Little, Brown include I Am Malala by Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, Homeland Elegies by Pulitzer Prize-winning Ayad Akhtar, Going There by Katie Couric, Julie and Julia by Julie Powell, Chaos by Tom O’Neill, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin, and Left on Tenth by Delia Ephron. She also edited many bestselling novels, including Room by Emma Donoghue, Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elizabeth Robinson and The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand.  Other writers she has published include Edna O’Brien, Andrew Sean Greer, Chigozie Obioma, Cherie Jones, Sarah Dunn, Jody Shields, Jake Tapper, Kevin Powers, Sarah Crossan, Kwame Alexander, and Sally Mann. Judy’s forthcoming titles for Summit Books are former PEN America President Peter Godwin’s memoir Exit Wounds, a new novel by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and author Ayad Akhtar, and filmmaker Mo Ogrodnik’s debut novel Gulf.