About Us

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

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.

Meagan Levinson

Editor in Chief, PublicAffairs

Email: meagan.Levinson@hbgusa.com

Meagan Levinson joined PublicAffairs in 2025 and publishes in current affairs, public policy, technology, politics, biography, and sociology. She is drawn to engaging and enduring nonfiction that deepens our understanding of consequential issues and events. Before joining PublicAffairs, Meagan was an executive editor of sociology and head of paperback publishing at Princeton University Press, where she published Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice, Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job, and Justin Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness.