Who We Are
Michael Jacobs (LinkedIn) has spent over 45 years in trade and consumer publishing in the United States, the UK and France. Newly retired, he spent almost 20 years as President and CEO of ABRAMS Books. Michael started his career at Penguin where he became President in 1990. After 15 years at Penguin, he held senior leadership positions at Simon and Schuster and Scholastic where he oversaw the sales, marketing and distribution for the first five Harry Potter books. He has served as Chair on the boards of the Academy of American Poets and the National Coalition Against Censorship and is currently on the board of governors of Yale University Press as well as the Corporation of Yaddo and the Bookselling Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC). Michael was an Eli Whitney scholar at Yale.
Sheridan Hay is a writer, editor and teacher. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), which features a lost manuscript by Herman Melville, was a Booksense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, it was published in fourteen countries. Sheridan has led the Center for Fiction’s popular Moby-Dick reading group many times, as well as leading a long-standing Henry James group, among others. Early in her career, Sheridan was an editor at Simon and Schuster and worked at Harper Collins and Penguin Books in New York and Sydney, Australia where she was born.
