NEW YORK, April 25—Dawn Davis will join Simon & Schuster in the role of Senior Vice President and Publisher of 37 Ink and Executive Editor of the Simon & Schuster trade imprint, it was announced today by Jonathan Karp, President and CEO of Simon & Schuster. Ms. Davis comes to her new role from Condé Nast, where since 2020 she has been Editor in Chief of Bon Appétit & Epicurious. She will begin in September.

In her role, Ms. Davis will also join Simon & Schuster’s executive leadership team, reporting directly to Mr. Karp.

For Ms. Davis the move marks a return to Simon & Schuster, which she first joined in 2013. She founded the 37 Ink imprint, titles from which enjoyed immediate success. Among the acclaimed and bestselling works Davis published during her previous time at the company are Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae, which inspired the popular HBO show Insecure; Tough Love by Susan Rice; and bestsellers by comedian Kevin Hart, weight loss expert JJ Smith, and Whiting Award winner Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of the short story collection Heads of the Colored People.

Jonathan Karp commented: “I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Dawn and working with her for decades and have long admired her commitment to her authors and to multicultural publishing, her entrepreneurial spirit and wide-ranging interests, and her collaborative nature. The world of book publishing is better for having Dawn back, and we are thrilled to have her rejoining Simon & Schuster.”

Dawn Davis said: “I have enjoyed working with Condé Nast leadership and my team to rebuild the Bon Appétit brand. Together, we’ve created a culture where people feel respected, created spectacular content and world-class recipes, brought back advertisers, and grown our social media footprint. But being away from books has only made me realize how much I love working on manuscripts. It’s been exhilarating to watch the books I acquired and edited become bestsellers, Jenna Bush Hager and Reese Witherspoon Book Club selections, Obama favorites and New York Times bestsellers. I am keen to be reunited with Jon Karp and the great team at Simon & Schuster, and for the opportunity to publish books again under the 37 Ink and Simon & Schuster banners.”

Before she joined Bon Appétit and Epicurious in 2020, Ms. Davis acquired and/or edited a number of titles that were then published by Simon & Schuster to great success, including Sadeqa Johnson’s Yellow Wife; Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (which former President Barack Obama named as one of his favorite books of 2022); Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev; Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife; and the forthcoming highly anticipated memoir by poet and Whiting Award winner Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon.

Prior to her first joining Simon & Schuster in 2013, Ms. Davis was publisher of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, where she was responsible for editing a number of renowned books, including The Known World by Edward P. Jones, which won the Pulitzer Prize; Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, which was one of the best-selling books of the decade; and The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner, which was also a beloved movie starring Will Smith.

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