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Who

With her partner Cindy Spiegel, Grau is co-head of Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau. She was previously the publisher of Penguin imprint Riverhead.

Backstory

Grau started out in publishing as an editor at Random House, and moved to the company's short-lived imprint Turtle Bay in 1991. Three years later, Penguin Group prez Susan Petersen Kennedy brought her and Cindy Spiegel (then an editor at Houghton Mifflin) into the Penguin fold, appointing them founding editors of its new imprint, Riverhead. Grau and Spiegel racked up a handful of big successes at Riverhead, such as Kurt Cobain's posthumous Journals, books by TV financial lady Suze Orman, and, most famously, Khaleid Hosseini's bestselling The Kite Runner. (Along the way, they were promoted to co-publishers.) In late 2005—in what came as a big shock to the publishing establishment—the duo bolted from Riverhead when then-Doubleday chief Steve Rubin offered them their own imprint, fittingly named Spiegel & Grau, at Random House-owned Doubleday. In December '08, on what was dubbed "Black Wednesday" for the publishing industry, the imprint survived mass cutbacks to become part of the Random House rather than the Doubleday division.

Of note

Spiegel & Grau—the name, they say, "reflects our personal commitment to stand behind our books"—has plans to publish 30 hardbacks and 40 paperbacks each year, a mix of literary fiction and commercial non-fiction. The launch title, which appeared in March 2007 (a year and a half after the imprint was formed) was Suze Orman's Women & Money. In 2008 S&G transitioned to a fuller publishing schedule; upcoming books include sophomore effort of Like Water for Elephants author Sara Gruen, Ape House (acquired in a two-book deal said to exceed a million dollars); a soccer book by Times style reporter Warren St. John; and a picture-heavy book by rapper-poet Mos Def.

In print

In 1997 Grau edited, with Adam Weinberg, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination and contributed to Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art from 1900-1950, Works from the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Personal

Grau lives with her husband Adam Stern and their two boys on the Upper West Side.

No joke

She wrote about her anxiety regarding being an older woman with long hair for the October 2005 issue of Vogue.