Taylor Norman
Executive Editor
Holiday House/Neal Porter Books
Taylor Norman, executive editor at Holiday House/Neal Porter Books, is Publishers Weekly’s 2024 Star Watch Superstar. Speaking with PW from her home in Oakland, Calif., Norman says she is excited to be recognized for what’s been a lifelong ambition. “I’ve always wanted to be a children’s book editor,” she says. “I’m picturing riding a horse and looking between their ears at the goal. It’s always been what I focused on.”
Norman spent 11 years with Chronicle Books, progressing from intern to senior editor. “At Chronicle, I worked on everything from picture books through middle grade,” with a dash of YA and board books, she says. “That’s what I do now, too.” Among her Chronicle projects were Carter Higgins and Emily Hughes’s Everything You Need for a Treehouse, Nina LaCour’s 2023 Lambda Award-winning The Apartment House on Poppy Hill, and Shawn Harris’s 2022 Caldecott Honor book, Have You Ever Seen a Flower.
With Harris as illustrator, Norman also worked on McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers’s 2017 picture book about the Statue of Liberty, Her Right Foot. That acquaintance led Norman to a freelance gig with McSweeney’s, co-editing Eggers’s 2024 Newbery Medal-winning novel, The Eyes and the Impossible, with Melanie Nolan, VP and associate publishing director at Knopf Books for Young Readers.
“Talk about a book that does not sacrifice any quality for its forward movement,” Norman says, recalling her first reading of Eggers’s manuscript. “It never fell down—it just kept escalating. I felt like the book was running right alongside Johannes, the dog protagonist, the whole time.”
Right away, Norman sensed the book’s Newbery prospects. “A long time ago, I went through a process of not letting myself hope for books to win awards,” she says, but then “I didn’t even get the joy of the fantasy.” In this case, that optimism proved warranted.
Watch a video interview with Norman here:
Norman came to Neal Porter Books in July 2022. She and Porter edit separately, publishing 30–35 books per year, and are the only editors for the imprint. Norman’s recent projects include If You Want to Ride a Horse by Amy Novesky, illustrated by Gael Abary; the Lone Wolf series by Kiah Thomas, illustrated by K-Fai Steele; and the forthcoming Tumblebaby by Adam Rex and Audrey Helen Weber.
“Neal and I overlapped for a long time,” Norman says. “We would each lose auctions to the other, over the course of many years,” and ended up working with the same authors and illustrators. She describes their “shared shorthand” of likes and dislikes, and a mutual radar for “authenticity and originality.”
“Taylor has great taste and one of the best and most discerning eyes in the business,” Porter says of his editorial partner. “She can look at a raw manuscript and immediately see the potential in it, then go to extraordinary lengths with the author to achieve that potential.” Along with being “consummately organized and pragmatic,” Porter says Norman is “a hell of a lot of fun to work with.”
Asked what the books she most wants to publish, Norman says she prizes high-quality writing and respect for the child reader. “Agents will ask, ‘What’s on your manuscript wish list?’ and I don’t really acquire that way,” she says. “When I acquire a book, what I’m looking for is not just the book itself, or even the idea or the writing. What I’m looking for is the person” creating the art, someone who understands that children are “basically the future adult readers.”
Norman notes that those interpersonal relationships are highly charged—“Any act of creativity is really emotional”—and central to editing children’s books. Children’s publishing, she says, “is a really small industry, and I love how human it is. There are so many people who are incredibly smart and creative in a million different ways. I put so much energy into cultivating those relationships, because it’s how we make the best books that we possibly can.”
