FSG Promotes Mitzi Angel to President

Mitzi Angel, the publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux — who as an editor signed Sally Rooney and Garth Greenwell — will add the title of president to her role at the storied literary publishing house.

She will take over from Jonathan Galassi, who will become chairman and executive editor after a 35-year career at FSG, part of Macmillan Publishers. Mr. Galassi, 71, served as both president and publisher until 2018, when Ms. Angel was hired as publisher. He will now report to both her and Jon Yaged, Macmillan’s president.

Ms. Angel, 47, will be the first woman to lead FSG when she officially starts her new role on Jan. 1. Her ascent continues a generational shift that has been working its way through book publishing. She is also one of several women in the industry who have taken on top jobs in recent years, including Reagan Arthur and Jordan Pavlin at Knopf, Lisa Lucas at Pantheon and Schocken Books, and Dana Canedy at Simon & Schuster. Last week, Adrienne Vaughan was promoted to president of Bloomsbury’s U.S. division.

FSG is known for publishing both commercial hits and award winners, including best-selling literary fiction, serious nonfiction and poetry. It has worked with such authors as Susan Sontag, Pablo Neruda, Tom Wolfe and John McPhee.

“The thing about publishing is that it’s a business, and yet it’s also more than a business,” Ms. Angel said. “FSG is an institution, it’s a cultural institution, so as well as thinking about what makes sense for us commercially, and having to be shrewd when we make our decisions, we also need to think about human value. And that’s important to me. I want to think of value beyond the quantitative.”

Ms. Angel, who as publisher has also overseen the Picador and MCD imprints, previously was publisher of Faber & Faber. Before that, she was an editor at FSG, acquiring and editing authors including Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner and Yiyun Li.

Mr. Galassi, who in his new role will continue to work with writers he has edited and will acquire some new ones, praised Ms. Angel’s “unique blend of openness, discernment and strength of character.” In a statement, he said: “She has a deep understanding of both FSG’s history and of today’s new challenges and opportunities, and as our publisher she has been tremendously effective in reimagining our publishing strategies and bringing in a new generation of great writers, all the while winning the admiration, trust, and affection of her colleagues.”

Ms. Angel will be just the third president in FSG’s 75-year history, following Mr. Galassi and Roger Straus.

“It’s really wonderful to have a great legacy to honor, but my attention is also on the future,” she said. “I don’t want FSG to be fusty or dusty.”

FSG has had a good fall season. It has published Ms. Rooney’s third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” as well as Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Crossroads” and Evan Osnos’s book “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury,” all of which have been New York Times best sellers. Last month, it published Amia Srinivasan’s “The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” which Ms. Angel edited.