Steve Wasserman

Steve Wasserman is publisher since 2016 of Heyday, a nonprofit, independent press founded in 1974 in Berkeley, California. He is a former literary editor of the Los Angeles Times and a principal founder of the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. He was also editorial director of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and of its paperback arm, The Noonday Press; and, later, editorial director of Times Books when it was an imprint of Random House. He went on to become a partner of Kneerim & Williams, a literary agency, where he represented numerous authors, including Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Linda Ronstadt, and David Thomson. Prior to joining Heyday, he was editor at large for Yale University Press. He is the author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays. HIs most recent essay, “The Rise and Fall and Rise of American Publishing,” appeared in the American quarterly journal Liberties (Winter 2026).