Debra Liese is the Senior Curator of Ideas and Content Partnerships at Princeton University Press, responsible for developing editorial features for the PUP Ideas site across a range of disciplines. She coordinates the PUP Podcast, produced in partnership with the New Books Network, a consortium of author-interview podcast channels, and is committed to improving public discourse, accessibility, and making scholarly ideas accessible for a general readership. In addition to hosting the Social Impact Fellowship, she has served as a mentor for the annual Princeton University Press Publishing Fellowship, an initiative aimed at addressing a lack of diverse representation across the publishing industry and designed for individuals with no prior publishing experience.

“When I started out in publishing, like so many others, I knew I enjoyed creative and intellectual expression of all sorts, but had a pretty limited sense of what the options were. Over the years I’ve worn a lot of hats in the publishing industry, from developing manuscripts for literary magazines, to pitching and promoting books as finished products. One of the most exciting things about my current focus in publishing has been the opportunity to think creatively about ideas, making connections, and how this work can make us better, more thoughtful people. Moral, political, and social issues are explored daily on the PUP Ideas site, by some of the most interesting and engaged writers. Our authors are a generous lot, and it’s a great joy to connect them to topics that excite them and to collaborate on features that are accessible and intriguing for academics and non-academics alike. Ideas are always the catalysts for change, for societal evolution and innovation on many levels, and I love that my daily work lets me spend time in that space.”