Maria Shriver Is Launching a New Book Imprint

Photo credit: Getty/Temi Oyeyola
Photo credit: Getty/Temi Oyeyola
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From Oprah Magazine

Maria Shriver, the Emmy Award-winning journalist and bestselling author of I’ve Been Thinking… announced today that she is partnering with Penguin Life to launch her own book imprint. The Open Field, as the imprint will be called, will publish books “that seek to inform, ignite, inspire, and move humanity forward one person at a time,” Shriver tells OprahMag.com exclusively. They will have the mission and purpose “of challenging readers to expand their minds in the quest for peace and compassion.”

Brian Tart, the President and Publisher of Penguin Life who has worked with Shriver on past books, says the imprint will publish roughly three books per year. Shriver has signed the first two: The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening, an anthology compiled by Tim Shriver and Tom Rosshirt (out March 16), whose contributors include Oprah Winfrey, T.D. Jakes, Arianna Huffington, and Elizabeth Gilbert; and The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self by Martha Beck (out April 13).

The imprint’s name was inspired by Rumi, one of Shriver’s favorite poets, who wrote: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Shriver hopes that The Open Field will be a place where visionary thinkers and artists will bring their stories to readers. “We are all moved forward by other people’s stories,” Shriver says. “One person, one soul, one heart at a time, stories raise us up.”

Maria Shriver is a mother of four, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist and producer, an NBC News Special Anchor, and the author of seven New York Times bestselling books, as well as a bestselling coloring book for individuals with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers. She is also the founder of the nonprofit The Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement and the media enterprise Shriver Media, which produces the highly-popular online newsletter The Sunday Paper and other digital content, documentaries, and films that ignite social conversations and inform the issues of our time.

Shriver first had the idea for a book imprint when she was still the First Lady of California with young children and a busy career as a television journalist. Whenever she met someone who inspired her, she thought: “Their vision—their story—should be shared in a book.”

Then, she was juggling too much to bring this dream to life. Now, as a 65-year-old single woman with grown children, the timing is exactly right. Shriver says, “I’m hopeful that when I look back on the imprint ten years from now, it will have become a gathering ground for influential people from all backgrounds who are having an impact on the world.”


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