Joy Peskin

As Executive Editorial Director of Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers and Division Vice President of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, Joy Peskin manages a department of six editors and edits a range of books for children and teenagers. Books she has edited for FSG BYR include The 57 Bus, by Dashka Slater, New York Times Bestseller and recipient of many honors including the Stonewall Book Award (winner), YALSA-ALA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction (finalist), Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction (honor); Speak: The Graphic Novel, written by Laurie Halse Anderson with art by Emily Carroll, recipient of five starred reviews; and For Black Girls Like Me and Stonewall Honor book In the Key of Us, by Mariama Lockington, each the recipient of five starred reviews.

At Macmillan, Joy is the leader of the MCPG Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee and she teaches a company-wide course on author care.

Before joining Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers in February, 2012, Joy was the associate publisher of Viking Children’s Books and an editor at Scholastic. A graduate of Vassar College and the Radcliffe Publishing Program, Joy has taught writing to aspiring authors, youth experiencing homelessness, women experiencing incarceration, and teens in a juvenile detention center. Her own essays have been published in Salon, Glamour, The Huffington Post, Parents magazine, Publishers Weekly, and Lilith magazine and she is the recipient of the Award for Excellence in Writing about Seniors, Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism. Dear Hope, a play she wrote, was produced by the Hangar Theater in Ithaca, New York, in November, 2020.

She has mentored and tutored children in New York City and New Jersey since 1997, and she is now a CASA (court appointed special advocate) within the foster care system in Essex County, New Jersey.