Helen Rouner
Editor
Penguin Press
Penguin Press editor Helen Rouner is the archetypal publishing professional. She is dedicated, enthusiastic, and excels at her work, which is why she’s Publishers Weekly’s 2025 Star Watch Superstar. “It still, sometimes, seems incredible to me, that being an editor is a job,” she says. “There’s such a lively community, however imperiled we are. As long as people are reading, as long as there is an industry, I want to be here.”
Rouner, who has lived most of her life in Brooklyn, is a 2019 Yale University graduate with a BA in English literature, who went on to earn a master of philosophy from Cambridge University in English Romantic poetry. While still in college, Rouner interned for Bellevue Literary Press; afterward, she interned for FSG before moving to Penguin Press in 2021.
In his letter nominating Rouner for Star Watch, Scott Moyers, president and publisher of Penguin Press, wrote, “She is the very definition of a rising star,” noting that she has been promoted three times in less than four years, moving from editorial assistant to editor, “a meteoric ascent as editorial timelines go.” He also praised her for having “already acquired an impressive core list of books” and for being “a formidably impressive advocate for her authors’ work in the world.”
Describing herself as a reader before anything else, Rouner says she’s always wanted to “make things happen,” adding that it was almost inevitable that she would end up in the “culture business” rather than academia. Working in publishing, she says, requires a “combination of deep reading and learning and thinking and caring about people and having a head for the business; that’s ultimately the only way that we keep institutional literature alive.”
Rouner marvels at what she calls her “extraordinary good fortune” in being trained by Moyers, “who has one of the great lists in publishing.” Among the books Rouner worked on with Moyers are The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (2023), The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut (2023), and Al Pacino’s memoir, Sonny Boy (2024). “It was almost immediate that I was in the deep end of the pool,” she says, noting that her primary interest is nonfiction but that she also acquires fiction. “I started acquiring my own books less than two years into the job.”
It was obvious long before Rouner’s promotion to editor in March, Moyers said in his nomination, that “she has all the tools to be a great acquisitions editor, including not just great taste but the capacity to communicate her enthusiasm so that it’s infectious.” He also praised her “razor-sharp editorial acumen” and “good bedside manner,” noting that “authors feel very secure in her hands through even the most thorough revision processes.”
Two of Rouner’s acquisitions were published this year to critical acclaim: Michael Clune’s debut novel, Pan, which in a starred review PW described as “evocative and erudite” and a “staggering coming-of-age saga,” and Lauren Christensen’s memoir Firstborn, which in another starred review PW called “a stunning achievement.” Rouner’s next release will be historian Christopher Clark’s study of a 19th-century Prussian sex cult, A Scandal in Königsberg (Mar. 2026). She’s also in the early stages of editing a book by Spencer Ackerman with the working title The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan. “It’s an extraordinary work of investigative journalism,” she says, “Spencer is reporting in a way that I think few journalists have the means or ability to in the environment that we’re in.”
Rouner says that while her acquisitions may seem wildly disparate, they have two things in common: they are thoroughly researched and deeply felt. “There’s a certain kind of electricity that some manuscripts have, and it’s different for each one,” Rouner says. “It’s the editor’s job to detect it, and to figure out how to nurture and preserve and sustain that feeling over the course of a whole manuscript. There’s something quite alchemical about a great book, I think.”
