Janet Silver

literary director, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth

Janet Silver is a publishing industry veteran of more than 30 years, with a distinguished career as a both a literary editor and publishing executive. She spent 24 years at Houghton Mifflin Company, where she led the adult trade editorial group for more than a decade, capped by six years as Vice President and Publisher. A noted editor of fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry, Silver acquired and edited works by a roster of acclaimed writers that includes Philip Roth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Galway Kinnell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anita Desai, John Edgar Wideman, Edna O'Brien, Amitav Ghosh, and Robert Stone. Two of her authors won the Pulitzer Prize: Lahiri in 2001 for her debut story collection *Interpreter of Maladies* and poet Natasha Trethewey for *Native Guard* in 2007. Many of the writers she discovered also went on to win national awards and honors, including Monique Truong (*The Book of Salt*), Michael Byers (*The Coast of Good Intentions*), and Peter Ho Davies (*The Welsh Girl*).