Dana Canedy is an American journalist and publishing executive. She was appointed senior vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship eponymous imprint in July 2020. She is the first African-American to head a "major publishing imprint" From 2017 to 2020, she served as administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. Canedy was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Radcliff, Kentucky, near Fort Knox, in a military family. She graduated from the University of Kentucky and worked at The Palm Beach Post and The Plain Dealer before joining The New York Times in 1996. She was named a senior editor at The New York Times in 2006. In August 2017, Canedy became administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University, the first woman and first person of color to hold the position. She is co-author of the series "How Race Is Lived in America", which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Canedy's segment in the series, "The Hurt Between the Lines: A Newsroom Divides After a Healing Series on Race," focused on the similar yet divergent paths of two award-winning columnists, one white, one black, from the Akron Beacon-Journal. She is the author of the memoir A Journal for Jordan: A Story of Love and Honor, which grew out of an essay she wrote for the New York Times about the death of her fiancé, United States ArmyFirst SergeantCharles Monroe King, in the Iraq War and the journal he left for their son. In a 2009 interview, Canedy said: "I needed to do something with my grief, after Charles died, something productive." In January 2018, Sony Pictures hired Academy Award-nominated writer Virgil Williams to adapt Canedy's book into a film directed and co-produced by Denzel Washington. As Pulitzer Prize administrator, Canedy has said the organization will do more to defend press freedom, "especially at a time when the news media is under extraordinary assault." In March 2018, she said future winners would showcase “the strength of the American press, even in the most trying of times.” On May 30, 2018, she oversaw the annual awards luncheon at Columbia, telling Kendrick Lamar that "we're both making history this year." Canedy lives in New York City.
