About Us Bold Type Books
Since its inception, more than twenty years ago, Bold Type Books has aimed to challenge power through narrative. That mission is at the heart of every book we put into the world: works of urgent and ambitious journalism, deeply researched creative nonfiction, revelatory cultural analysis and social history, and memoir that inhabits the intersection of the personal and the political.
As Bold Type barrels into the future, we remain committed to deconstructing systemic injustice, moving readers to question the status quo, and to a constant exploration and expansion of how literature might accomplish these goals. Extraordinary uses of language challenge power. Narratives that are nonlinear, non-redemptive, and otherwise distinct in form challenge power. The ways in which we edit and produce books, in an industry that is constantly pressing authors into the same shapes, challenge power. Our writers complicate dangerous and reductive myths that have been positioned as foundational to American and other cultures. They also name the unnamed, telling stories that were previously missing from our collective histories or deliberately removed from the archive.
The product of a dynamic partnership between the journalism nonprofit Type Media Center and Hachette Book Group, Bold Type has published bestselling books by a diverse range of essayists, activists, journalists, groundbreaking academics, and other thought leaders, with a particular focus on emerging and historically excluded writers.
Many of our titles have won significant awards—including the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, and Lambda Literary Awards— and led the conversation on such subjects as the nature of protest, the meaning of work, the climate crisis, gentrification, white supremacy, American masculinity, maternal health, and prison abolition.
There are two ways in which books are acquired by Bold Type Books. One is based at Type Media Center, where an Editorial Board works with our extensive community of TMC Fellows, Reporters, and friends to develop and acquire books. The other is by the editors at PublicAffairs, who also acquire books directly for the Bold Type Books imprint.
Lara Heimert
President and Publisher, the Basic Books Group
Phone: 212-364-0669
Email: lara.heimert@hbgusa.com
Twitter: @laraheimert
Lara Heimert joined Basic Books in 2005. Previously, she was publisher of the trade division at Yale University Press. She has published numerous prize-winning and New York Times bestselling titles. Highlights include Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork, Victor Davis Hanson’s The Dying Citizen, Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm, and Jason Riley’s Maverick. A graduate of Princeton University, Lara acquires primarily in the field of history, broadly conceived—from world wars to marginalia, from culinary history to political theory, from diaspora to doodles.
Brian J. Distelberg
VP, Associate Publisher
Phone: 212-364-0655
Email: brian.distelberg@hbgusa.com
Brian J. Distelberg joined Basic Books in 2015 and acquires and publishes primarily in history, including multiple New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning books. Notable titles include Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia, Martha Jones’s Vanguard, Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion, Peniel Joseph’s The Sword and the Shield, Martyn Rady’s The Habsburgs, Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans, and Myth America, edited by Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer. He also publishes a select number of books in politics, where highlights include Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness and Jonathan Sacks’s Morality. Brian worked previously at Harvard University Press and holds a PhD in US history from Yale University.