Amanda Cook, current executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has been hired by Crown. Starting on February 6, Cook will step into the role of v-p and executive editor at the Random House division, which has been reorganized and steadily staffed up since Maya Mavjee became president and publisher in December 2010. Cook will continue to be based in Boston but, as Crown put it, "be a frequent presence at our offices in New York."
At Crown, Cook will continue to focus on the categories she handled at HMH: science, history, current affairs, psychology, politics, and other social sciences. In a memo about the hire, Molly Stern, senior v-p and publisher of Crown and Hogarth, said Cook will be tasked with growing Crown's nonfiction list and "building upon her remarkable track record of publishing critically acclaimed and commercially successful books." Cook's authors include Jonah Lehrer (How We Decide); Lee Smolin (The Trouble with Physics); Jack Rakove (Revolutionaries); and Stephen Baker (The Numerati).
