About J. D. Landis

James David Landis is an award-winning American novelist, children’s author, and former publisher at William Morrow.

Early Years

He was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he attended public schools and had his first jobs repairing sewers and playing saxophone and clarinet in a jazz quartet.

William Morrow

After graduating magna cum laude from Yale College, he went to New York and worked his way through the Yellow Pages, visiting every listed publisher until the final one offered him a position. A year later he joined William Morrow, rising over two decades to become senior vice president, publisher, and ultimately editor-in-chief. During that span he championed bestsellers and literary debuts alike, publishing such authors as Robert Pirsig, Richard Powers, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Jacqueline Susann, Jancis Robinson, Salvador Dalí, Nicholas Delbanco, Tariq Ali, Mick Fleetwood, Morris West, and Patricia Nell Warren—most notably editing Pirsig’s landmark Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He won both the Roger Klein Award for Editing and the Advocate Humanitarian Award, honoring his craft and his advocacy for marginalized voices.

Early Novels for Young Readers

Landis’s first novel, The Sisters Impossible, earned an International Reading Association Children’s Choice citation and appeared on the Sequoyah Book Award Masterlist. Over the next decade, he published five additional young-adult novels, including The Band Never Dances. He later returned to children’s literature with the poetry collection Cars on Mars: and 49 Other Poems for Kids on Earth.

Transition to Adult Literary Fiction

Landis’s move into adult literary fiction began with Lying in Bed—winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Morton Dauwen Zabel Award—followed by Longing, named a New York Times Notable Book and praised by The Guardian as one of the finest novels about music. Subsequent titles include Artist of the Beautiful, The Last Day, and the Polish-language-only biographical novel Dagny, Życie i Śmierć.

Current Projects and Life

Based in New Hampshire and New York City, Landis continues to write fiction and serves as wine editor and columnist for The Cook’s Cook, the culinary website founded by his wife, food writer Denise Landis.