Dana Canedy is Senior Vice President and Publisher of the Simon and Schuster imprint. She is responsible for the overall leadership and operations of the division. Canedy was previously the Administrator of The Pulitzer Prizes, where she oversaw all aspects of the prestigious awards program in journalism, letters, and the arts. She also served on its board of directors and was the spokesperson for the Pulitzers.
She is a former New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written extensively on a broad range of topics, including business and finance, terrorism, politics, law enforcement, crime, race, and class. She is also an author, media executive, and motivational speaker who has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, and the former Oprah Winfrey Show.

Canedy is the author of the 2008 New York Times bestselling memoir, A Journal For Jordan, about life with her war-hero partner and the journal he left for their infant son before being killed in combat in Iraq. The book has been published in 10 countries in eight languages and has been optioned for a movie by Denzel Washington and Columbia Pictures. It has been adapted for film by Mudbound co-writer Virgil Williams for Mr. Washington and Todd Black of Escape Artists, who are producing the project. Mr. Washington is directing the movie, with Michael B. Jordan starring.

As part of the newsroom senior management team at the New York Times, Canedy led talent acquisition, management training, and staff development across media platforms. Before The Pulitzer Prizes in July 2017, she was special advisor to The Times CEO and Executive Editor on strategic planning, talent acquisition, change management, and diversity and inclusion best practices. During her more than 20-year tenure at The Times, she also oversaw national breaking news coverage, assigning and editing the work of dozens of domestic correspondents in 12 news bureaus across the country.
Before that, Canedy was Florida bureau chief for The Times, where she was responsible for all news coverage for the state. She was a lead writer and editor on The Times’s series, “How Race Is Lived In America,” about race relations in the United States, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She joined The Times in 1996 as a national business and finance reporter. Prior to joining The Times, Canedy was a reporter for the Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland, where she covered law enforcement, suburban government, and local business. She spent a year as an editor directing metropolitan coverage. She also worked for a year at the Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida, reporting on law enforcement and crime.

Canedy is a founding board member of the Digital Diversity Network, a non-profit trade association that advances inclusion in the leadership and ownership ranks of the digital media industry. She is also a board member of Project Morry, a non-profit youth development organization that supports at-risk students. Canedy is also a motivational speaker who has traveled extensively to universities, military installations, and corporate headquarters, speaking about effective leadership, change management, overcoming adversity, and the elements of success. Reared in Radcliff, Kentucky, she graduated from The University of Kentucky in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. The school named her a Distinguished Alumni in 2017. She lives in New York City with her son Jordan.