I am VP, associate publisher at the Basic Books Group, where I oversee the editorial direction of the Basic Books, PublicAffairs, Seal Press, and Basic Venture imprints. I’ve worked at Basic Books since 2015.
Books I have edited and published include the New York Times bestsellers Slouching Towards Utopia, by Brad DeLong, and Myth America, edited by Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer; Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion and Jacqueline Jones’s No Right to an Honest Living, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as Michael Willrich’s American Anarchy, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Martha S. Jones’s Vanguard, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History; Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Peniel E. Joseph’s The Third Reconstruction and Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, both winners of the RFK Book Award; Alice Baumgartner’s South to Freedom, winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and finalist for the Lincoln Prize; and Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans, shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
Other highlights in history include Erika Lee’s America for Americans, Martyn Rady’s The Habsburgs, Roderick Beaton’s The Greeks, Eckart Frahm’s Assyria, Bruce Gordon’s The Bible, and Edward J. Watts’s Mortal Republic. Highlights in politics and current affairs include Jonathan Sacks’s Morality, Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart, and Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz’s To End a Presidency.
Previously, from 2011 through 2015, I worked at Harvard University Press, where I acquired and edited a number of prizewinning books, among them Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire.
I received a PhD in history from Yale, where my training focused on twentieth-century US politics and culture. I’m also a graduate of Harvard, where I concentrated in history and literature.
I live in New York City.
Brian J. Distelberg 