The first time I met Lisa Lucas was around 2012, through mutual publishing friends, in the early days after my arrival in New York City. While I was a wide-eyed foreigner trying to cobble together a new life for myself in the States, and a not-yet-published writer working in publishing (the worst combination if you want to be a good writer), Lisa was a pistol. She was quick to give advice, quick to smile, always happy to chat for a few minutes, and always keen to connect with others. Even back then, I could sense that she sought people, not their status.

When I met Lisa, she was the publisher of the nonprofit magazine Guernica. She went on to serve as the executive director of the National Book Foundation for four years, before accepting the position of senior vice president and publisher of Pantheon Books and Schocken Books, imprints of Penguin Random House. She was the first Black woman to hold each of these positions. The publishing industry as well as the media like to remind everyone of this, as if they were the ones doing the work that Lisa was doing all along.

Lisa entered book publishing in a nontraditional way, taking a very different path from the more common publishing-­career trajectory of starting as an assistant and then climbing the ranks over time. Before Guernica, she had been the director of education at the Tribeca Film Institute, and before that, the telefund manager at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Back in the day, she interned at Vibe magazine. She approached each of these opportunities with boldness and bravery. In June 2020, when publishing executives faced strong pressure to bring diversity and equity to the table, Lisa tweeted: “Anyone need someone to run an equitable publishing house? *raises hand*.” In July 2020, Penguin Random House hired her.

In summer 2021, when my debut novel, The Nursery, went out on submission, our relationship changed from that of mere acquaintances. She was the publisher who saw something in my book, and I was the author who wanted her to be my editor. Our first call about the book was as filled with giggles as it was with shrewd, constructive feedback. It’s hard to describe how much it meant to hear someone say, “I want you to take your book as far as you can,” when your story focuses on a subject (postpartum depression) that I felt few wanted to take seriously in literary fiction, but Lisa encouraged me to write without limits. (The book went on to become a New York Times Notable Book of 2023.)

Within the traditional corporate publishing structure of Penguin Random House, Lisa competitively acquired book manuscripts for both Pantheon and Schocken, served as the editor of select titles, and started building a work family, which meant hiring and strengthening a new team. Even while she handled these large and demanding roles, she took a granular interest in the work—like fighting to get spot gloss on my cover, which mean that the words a novel would shine as if dripped out of a blurry postpartum nipple. I wanted her to succeed so badly that for a while I didn’t see that she was tasked with being responsible for a tremendous amount of work—perhaps an unreasonable amount of work for any one person to manage. 

Barely four years into the gig at Penguin Random House, Lisa was let go, and I, like many others, lost my publisher and editor. For anyone who might not know, it can take twelve to twenty-four months for a book to be published after it’s been acquired. Sometimes longer. Still, even in this short amount of time, Lisa had relaunched the Australian writer Helen Garner in the US, published debut authors like Laura Warrell (whose novel Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize), and championed award-winning British writers like Diana Evans, Sathnam Sanghera, and Guy Gunaratne on this side of the pond. In my eyes, she was just getting started—now we will simply have to see what she’ll do next.

—Szilvia Molnar

I. A HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY PATH

THE BELIEVER: Looking at everything that you’ve done throughout your career—and correct me if I’m wrong—I always saw you as a searcher. You and I got to know each other when you were working at Guernica—

LISA LUCAS: What was I like back then? Back in the Guernica days?

BLVR: I feel like you were this beautiful, forceful wind that swept in, wanting to connect and talk. You had a lot of passion and energy. You were always very warm and welcoming. But it also felt like you wanted a bigger challenge, both in the publishing world and beyond it. Do you recognize any of that?

LL: I’ve had this higgledy-piggledy path. I started in theater—I was raising money for a theater company—and because I got involved with the education department, I subsequently moved to a youth theater, where I worked on educational programs. Later, I went into film and I worked at [the] Tribeca [Film Festival], running educational programs there. Then I left and started at Guernica, which was this free online magazine. I went on to the National Book Awards, which was part of the National Book Foundation, an organization whose mission is making sure that literature is accessible to all. Then I went into commercial book publishing, which is one of the only industries that has the scale to move something to all Americans; it’s one of the more reliable ways to disseminate information to a large block of American readers.

BLVR: Was your path connected to the type of upbringing you had?

LL: I was really privileged in the sense that I grew up in a family that was part of the arts. My father was a musician; my mother was an avid reader and cultural consumer. They were interested in plays and dance and theater and books—it made my life really rich, and it made their lives really rich. I always felt kind of confused when I was super young and I’d be in spaces and say, “Oh my god, this book is so good,” and people would be like, “What?” They were not on the same page. It was never a question of being dumb or smart. It was never a question of being a snob or not. It was never a question of anything other than the fact that everybody is exposed to different things. For me, I saw that we were not offering invitations broadly to American society to participate in nuance. Every single thing I’ve ever done has been driven by this question: How do you make a thing accessible to more people? Whether it’s raising money so that literacy programs can thrive, or marketing those programs, or publishing a book and trying to think about the best way to get it in front of a lot of people—for me that is the most exciting work; it’s where my energy comes from. I’m a book person and a nerd, but I’m also an extrovert, someone who is very communicative and loves conversation, interchange, argument, and debate.

BLVR: Could you give me an example of what that might have looked like, in a tangible way, at the National Book Awards?

LL: Well, one random anecdote about my time at the NBA that’s perhaps related: I was on a train and I remember meeting a couple and chatting with them about books and work and life and politics. At some point, I had gone on so long about the book I was reading that I just handed it to the wife and told her I had another copy at the office and a different book in my purse. A few months later I did an interview with CBS News and mentioned that the National Book Foundation [NBF] needed financial support to grow. A few days later, I got a check for five thousand dollars from the couple on the train.

BLVR: That requires a lot of openness on your part and also an interest in other people, which can be a rare thing these days—to have the strength to connect with others rather than shut down. It seems as though you also feed off that. Returning to your background, can you see where that came from?

LL: I don’t come from cynical people. It’s always been important to me to not be cynical. I also grew up with people who very much paved their own ways. They were like, I’m not necessarily gonna do this the way that somebody else does it. I’m not necessarily gonna follow this rule or that rule, but I’m gonna actually chase the thing that makes sense to me. For me, that made me feel like who I was and what I wanted to do was OK, that I didn’t have to go be a lawyer or take on a more typical, well-understood professional career in order to be a person who had stability or success in this life.

One thing I like to share is that I’m much more exuberant than either of my parents. I think everybody was a little surprised when I came out with so much energy and personality. They always encouraged me to love what I loved without making me feel stupid about it. It’s not about money. It’s not about winning. It’s about being open-hearted and working together to create a more robust and widely accessible cultural apparatus.

II. “I’M NOT AFTER MASTERY”

BLVR: You seem to read broadly and have so many different interests. I’ve always been jealous not only of your appreciation and knowledge of graphic novels, but also of your deep knowledge of nonfiction and international fiction.

LL: The life of a dilettante! The broad reading has always been with me. When we narrow our interests to these very specific lanes, sure, there can be mastery. But I’m not after mastery. I’m after human experience, depth, enrichment, and living more lives than I’m allowed to live. A lot of the books that I read as a young reader were recommendations from other people. And I feel like that experience of receiving good book recommendations and then actually reading the books made me an anti-snob.

BLVR: What are the specific books that have made a big impact on you?

LL: This is always such a difficult question. There are the books that teach you to love reading as a child: how I loved Bunnicula, The Pushcart War, the social nature of The Baby-Sitters Club books, the weird sadness of The Lonely Doll. And then there are the books that set you on a particular path in young adulthood—Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile, Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker, [Theodore] Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, [Edith] Wharton’s The House of Mirth, [James] Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the stories of Steven Millhauser, Mary Gaitskill, and Toni Cade Bambara. Each of these reading experiences was singular, and I consider them all dear old companions and return to them often.

You know, I do not need a book to carry me along. I’m happy to do the work with the book, to pick up what it’s putting down. And I love that, but that’s not the only kind of book. Books are tools. When I see somebody reading a self-help book, I’m glad they’re reading a self-help book, regardless of whether I read self-help. Other people’s preferences don’t change my own taste. I just think that books are for everyone, and that means different kinds of books can exist. I think there’s value in all of them—or most of them. They all mean something to someone.

BLVR: Over the years you’ve talked about the mentors you’ve had in your life. I get the impression they have been a driving force, a way for you to feel supported in your desires, goals, and visions. How have your mentors entered your life, and how have these relationships changed over the years?

LL: Some people teach you a lot and then leave your life, while others are there with you the whole time. For me, mentor is such a specific word. Loosely defined, the word—as I think you mean it—is really about anyone who takes an interest in you and teaches you something in the spirit of wanting to see you succeed. I’ve been so lucky. For every person who believes in you, there are three million that don’t. It is vital to have the support of people who actually want to help you grow in a world that can be very difficult and challenging, especially for a young Black woman. I’m not super young anymore, but for a lot of my career I was considered precocious in the things I was doing. I think you need a lot of support when you’re a woman, when you’re young, when you’re a person of color, when you’re making big changes in an industry and thinking about how to challenge existing systems.

BLVR: What have you learned from your mentors? Do you feel comfortable sharing who they are?

LL: No one does anything all by themselves. You need people to hire you, train you, teach you, recommend you, correct you—in a caring and non-scary way, which is often the difference between a mentor and a boss—congratulate you, and keep you humble.

I’ve always had the same personality that I have now—enthusiastic, energetic, casual, transparent, opinionated, confident, determined, and, of course, a host of terrible flaws. And for this reason, especially early on, and extra-especially as a precocious young Black woman, I’ve always needed support. And I’ve been so lucky to find it. In particular, I could call out three people without whom I would not be me [in publishing], and those are legendary publisher Fiona McCrae, NBF board chair and Open Road [Integrated] Media CEO David Steinberger, and my age peer the brilliant Flatiron publisher Megan Lynch. They have been believers, guides, champions, gentle scolders, teachers, and forceful reminders to keep going when I want very badly to give up. I wish I’d had people like them in my life when I was in my twenties and early thirties. Ultimately, mentorship is about believing in the future and not being intimidated by the fact that life will go on when we retire and cycle out; and that until every American wants to call themselves a reader, the work continues; and that we are all working in lockstep, aside from the folks for whom this is solely about the money and prestige.

I don’t know that my career would be possible without champions like them, because I’ve never felt that the world was straight up ready to receive me without somebody else cosigning me. It’s challenging even now. I left book publishing, and the question is: Will I go back? Can I go back? At present, there’s no indication that I can.

BLVR: This makes me think of how writers also need champions. As a writer, you can write for yourself, you can look for an audience, but at the same time you need those champions in your corner who speak out and say that what you’re doing is good and interesting so you don’t feel crazy or completely alone. None of us can do this alone, in any of the roles we have in publishing. At Pantheon, you introduced me to every person who was working behind the scenes to make my book come to life—from the assistant who sent galleys out to prizes, to the copy editor patiently going through my comments, to the cover designer who put together incredible mock-ups. It was very moving and made me feel much more connected to what we were trying to accomplish with the publication of The Nursery.

LL: I think it’s so important to be collaborative. It’s really important for there to be a family around anyone doing difficult work. A work family, if you will. Even if it’s temporary or project-specific. But to create that kind of support and collaboration, to say, We’re all on the same page and this is what we’re going to do—I love that kind of work. It’s one of the most beautiful things to watch a book be made, or to put on an awards show. It’s a hundred thousand steps. I’ve never been an isolationist. When people think about books, they might think that the writer and the editor sit down and they work together and then there’s a book. No! There are so many different people that are part of the process. Of course, the writer is the show. Without the writer, there’s nothing. But the support that turns the writer’s work into a book is such interesting magic.

I’ve worked pretty consecutively since I was fifteen. Part of the joy of working for me is being a part of a team. I don’t know if my work will be as team-driven, moving forward, but I’m still imagining all the different ways I can be of service and work purposefully and successfully.

III. “THERE’S PLEASURE IN THE GROWING”

BLVR: You mentioned that you’ve been working so hard since you were fifteen.

LL: I don’t know if it was “so hard,” but yes, working.

BLVR: But even the fact that you’ve dared to try different art forms: I’m very impressed by that.

LL: I’m getting a little old to be brave.

BLVR: What was one of your early internships like—say, at Vibe? And how does it feel looking back on that time now?

LL: Reflecting on it now, I think it’s wild that I started interning at fifteen. Vibe was an incredible experience—at the time it was still owned by Quincy Jones and there really wasn’t anything else quite like it. I worked in the less-sexy advertising department for the publisher and the president’s assistant. I certainly felt super young and very far out of my depth, but I was pleasantly surprised that they were absolutely willing to let me do real tasks, like the college interns were doing. Mostly, I just learned that I really, really liked to work and that I loved the energy and collaboration of offices. A very cool thing to be into at fifteen, I know.

BLVR: In light of all the experiences you’ve had, do you know some of the things you would like to try next?

LL: Listen, I’m on the cusp of forty-five years old. A forty-five-year-old middle-aged woman. It’s like a movie trope: life falls apart and you rebuild. This is the most difficult time, the most difficult part of your life, to have to reimagine everything because the world is reimagining you. I’m not this young, energetic breath of wind anymore. I’m grown. I may have a youthful spirit. I may not yet have a lot of wrinkles, but I am my age. It’s an interesting moment. I think it’s different for men at forty-five; a lot of them seem to be coming into their power. I don’t think that I’m not—I’m not ready to toss in the towel yet at all, by any stretch of the imagination—but I do think I’m deeply in the middle of considering what it means to have both the opportunity and the need to reimagine who I am. So much of who I am and what I put my life into has been my professional self. Everybody picks things. You look on TikTok and you see these moms who are like, I have twenty-three children and I’m homesteading, and that’s where I’ve devoted all my energy, which is its own thing. Some people are careerists and spend their time working. Some people are family people. Where I’ve devoted my time, my space, my energy, my love, and my passion has been to my career, and it’s not been for the sake of winning. If you had asked me when I was thirty what the next fifteen years would be like, I wasn’t dreaming of any of this stuff. I was dreaming of getting things done.

BLVR: I wanted to come around to the idea of work. As a non-American, I feel that Americans have an obsessive mind around work.

LL: A psychosis.

BLVR: Exactly, and that a person’s value is connected so deeply to their career or achievements. How do you feel about all that? If your career has brought joy and knowledge to a lot of people, where in all that do you want to focus on yourself? What in all that brings you joy?

LL: There’s this Faulkner quote. It’s actually one of the epigraphs of Studs Terkel’s Working, which is such an interesting exploration of what we do, how we do it, why we do it, and what it means. Faulkner says, “You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours a day—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.” Work itself implies labor, difficulty, having to do something. But there’s nothing else that we can do for all those hours. We want to be useful. I don’t know what pleasure is outside of work, because usefulness and purpose are my joys. They are my whys. I don’t know if I want to be stressed out and attached to my smartphone and computer and smartwatch three thousand hours a day for the rest of my life. But for me, my sense of purpose is work, and so my sense of joy is also tied to work.

Of course, it is beneficial to have some time to reflect and sleep and read deeply. That is one of the pleasures I’ve gotten back. Whether it was at the foundation or when I was working in book publishing or even in those Guernica years, the hustle was so extreme that I really lost the ability to just pick up a book I felt like reading—read it, enjoy it, and sink in. That is a reclaimed joy that I think this time is providing. I don’t find a huge amount of joy in rebuilding unexpectedly, but I recognize the gloriousness of being able to look at a blank slate and say, Who am I and what will I be? There’s pleasure in the growing and the being and the thinking and the learning, but I’ve also taken such great pleasure in my work. It’s electric and addictive.

IV. “NOBODY WANTS TO FEEL LIKE A MASCOT”

BLVR: You’ve been a public figure throughout the years. Are there things you want people to know about you that you haven’t gotten the chance to express?

LL: Look, publicity is so superficial, right? I think I became a “visible” person when I started at the National Book Foundation. That visibility happened because there hadn’t ever been a person of color—let alone a woman of color—in charge of running that institution. It was 2016, and we were beginning to engage in a conversation about what equity and inclusion and diversity meant inside these different institutions. I wish people would think more about why my role was so overexposed and why there needed to be such disproportionate coverage of an arts administrator who can tell a good joke and likes a sequined dress—because that coverage tries to make it seem as though things have changed when they haven’t. It’s important to think about the pressure that that exposure puts on a person: we need to feel collectively like we’re doing better, so we’re going to put all this onto one human. Why not do the work to actually make things equitable rather than just highlight my one little corner, which is going to make my life harder to navigate, and my work harder to navigate?

I’m not shy. I neither hate nor crave attention. I feel neutral about it. I feel like a lot of the media and the publicity and the visibility has served my goals. Some of it is my own semi-compulsive need to communicate using Twitter and Instagram. But that also comes from being engaged deeply in conversation and connection, which is the ultimate root of my love of books and music and dance and theater and film and visual arts and the arts community. I’m really lucky that I have a point of view, and that I get to share that point of view, and everybody doesn’t have that opportunity. That has been helpful, but it’s also been an enormous pressure because of the focus on my identity. There’s no universe in which events would have unfolded in this way without my identity being what it is. No one wants to feel used. Nobody wants to feel like a mascot.

Also, it’d be nice to go through difficult things privately, but that isn’t always an option, for me at least. Of course, I could have just logged off my Twitter, but it’s not a choice for my personality. I’m not a hider. My dad died. It was important to me to be open about my grief. Right now I think I’m in a moment of very public exploration. If everybody’s gonna be wondering, What is she gonna do?, then I might as well have that conversation.

BLVR: And in all that, even if you’re not shy, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need care, or support, or patience, or respect.

LL: Yeah, I’m human. There’s the communication that happens on social media, which I find very comfortable and supportive, actually, like a blanket—I’m really invested in that community. But then there’s the media, where you can end up regardless of whether or not you actively chose to participate in it. I find that more challenging. It’s a lot of scrutiny.

But yeah, of course you need care. Every single one of us is just a person. Again, we’re communicating with each other using the internet all the time, which then creates an abstraction: you no longer become Szilvia; you become an avatar—I can see your Instagram picture in my mind’s eye right now, if I close my eyes. Even if there’s connection, it can become dehumanizing. I think we have to really figure out how to change that. Every decade, every century, every generation, it’s How do we become human in these new contexts? People can seem strong and be quite weak. People can seem weak and be quite strong. It’s very obscure when we’re all hiding behind the internet.

V. PREPARING FOR THE CYCLES

BLVR: Can you share a little bit about where you are in your life right now, mentally and work-wise?

LL: I’m taking a year off; I’m on this sort of accidental sabbatical. It feels like a good time to be rethinking the future. Right now, we’re just past an election, and we have no idea what the years are going to look like. Everybody’s in a state of panic in my universe. There’s so much in the discourse about banning books, about whether or not people should stay on Twitter/X… I think of the freedoms that we’ve enjoyed throughout the entirety of my life and over the course of many, many generations. One really worries. So I think it’s a good time to sit back and look at the landscape and ask, Where are readers? Where are publishers? Where are the arts? Where is the funding? What are the challenges? What can we do to create a safer future, a more expressive future, one where we have a multiplicity of voices that are well read and where events are well attended?

BLVR: Yes, perhaps I should mention that we are recording this right after the 2024 election, and our interview will be published in the spring. It’s almost like we’re talking into the future. How does that make you feel?

LL: It’s really hard to be optimistic in times like these. We’ve been through a pandemic, a racial reckoning. We’ve been through a backlash to the racial reckoning. We’ve been through book bans, elections, uprisings, riots. Also, when you look at books, you have a completely changed marketplace. It looks nothing like it did eight years ago, sixteen years ago. It’s in its most challenged spot ever in a lot of ways, specifically when you think about the literary world—I’m not talking about whether or not Colleen Hoover is selling books.

I was on the subway the other day, and I always count how many people are reading physical books. It was this incredible day when there were, like, twelve people reading. It felt like 2006. They all had their hardcover books out and one was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message. Somebody was reading a classic. Somebody was reading a work in translation. It felt like, OK, the work I do is actually present here in this space with these strangers. It was a reminder, for all the days when I sit on the subway and don’t see people reading those books, that people are always still interacting and interfacing with books and art.

It’s easy to get frustrated in these dips and these moments when things are not necessarily going the way you hoped they would go. Remember that it’s all just cycles. The job for me at the moment is thinking about how to be ready for the next cycle, how to keep strengthening the audience and reminding people that despite the challenges within the book industry, books possess great value and bring great joy and are of great import. And that when we think about the politics we’re living through, a book is going to be one of the things that can give you the most information, insight, and depth of knowledge. It’s a good time to lean in.

A lot of people are confused about what’s happening. I always say: If you want to think about the American conservative movement from the 1950s on, read Rick Perlstein. His books make what’s happening now and how we arrived at this place more legible. For me that’s a comfort. Comfort isn’t just a sweet, fun book that makes you feel good and has a happy ending. Sometimes it’s about knowing more and feeling more empowered. So I’m optimistic. Things are getting more confusing and more complicated, which is not great—we’re all going to need more information. And we also need relief. What happens to my nervous system when I read a book for an hour is that I become one with that book, and for that hour I’m not engaging with all the issues and problems outside in the world. That, too, is a real gift.