Penguin Classics

Elda Rotor (she/her) is Vice President and Publisher for Penguin Classics. She oversees the U.S. classics publishing program including the works of John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, William Golding, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and the Pelican Shakespeare series. Elda originated several series including the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection, Penguin Vitae, Penguin Liberty, Penguin Drop Caps, Penguin Orange Collection, Penguin Horror with Guillermo del Toro, Penguin Civic Classics, and a series of African American classics curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. She was a founding member of the PRH DEI Council and led the Penguin Publishing Group Diversity Committee. She is a board member for the Academy of American Poets and an advisory board member of Kundiman, a national organization dedicated to Asian American creative writing. She published People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated by Tiffany Tsao, winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Prize. In 2013, she co-produced and narrated Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics, named one of the Best Apps of the Year by Apple. For Penguin Books and Viking, she edited the Lambda Literary Award finalist Fairest by Meredith Talusan, Legendary Children by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, and the New York Times-bestselling The Inaugural Address by Barack Obama. She has worked with a wide range of contributors including Gene Luen Yang, Nnedi Okorafor, Leigh Bardugo, Kevin Young, Jason Reynolds, Tracy K. Smith, Kevin Wilson, Mahogany L. Browne, Sofia Coppola, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patti Smith, Victor LaValle, Elaine Castillo, Tom Perrotta, Rebecca Mead, James Earl Jones, Lynn Nottage, David Simon, Jeff VanderMeer, and Lois Lowry. Prior to Penguin, Elda was a Senior Editor at Oxford University Press.