Specialties: Serious non-fiction, narrative non-fiction, current events, memoir, politics, history, popular culture, and popular science.

 

Karen Wolny has over three decades of editorial experience in publishing. It began at Oxford University Press, where she dove into her career working with such venerable and award-winning historians as Edward Ayers, Sean Wilentz, and David Hackett Fischer. Later, as the Publishing Director of Social Sciences at Routledge, she had the opportunity to publish truly cutting-edge books, most notably working with Susan Stryker on the first Transgender Reader, which was a Lambda Literary Award winner. 

 

Wolny diversified her list more broadly toward issue-oriented topics from thought leaders, both established and emerging, and turned her focus to include publishing books on gender, race, and social justice. Her editorial career transitioned from academic and university presses and became more entrenched in traditional trade houses, first as the Editorial Director at Palgrave Macmillan and later as an Executive Editor at St. Martin’s Press. There she published books on the kinds of social issues discussed around any lively dinner table, books that draw back the veil on the establishment, that explore topics where culture meets economics, that stir the pot and give us a new way to look at the present or the past, or just at the way we live now.

 

She worked with Samantha Powers on her first book, Realizing Human Rights; with Maria Shriver on The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink; with LA Times bestseller Rana Awdish on MD, In Shock, A Doctor Turned Critically Ill Patient Explores the Humanity Gap in Medicine; with NY Times bestseller Ron Miscavige on Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me; with William McCants of the Brookings Institute on The Isis Apocalypse; with Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country’s foremost addiction experts, on Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids; with Omar Saif Ghobash, the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to France, on Letters to a Young Muslim; with bestselling author and feminist leader Phyllis Chesler; and with Hayden Herrera on Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo.

 

Wolny is passionate about working closely with authors at every level to write proposals, develop and edit full-length manuscripts, and to lend a deft hand in helping authors navigate the publishing process in general. 

 

To visit Karen Wolny’s personal website, click here.

 

 Email: karenwolny@gmail.com