Jonathan Galassi

Galassi lives in Brooklyn. He was married to Susan Grace, with whom he has two daughters. The couple divorced in late 2011. He is gay.

Galassi is also a translator of poetry and a poet himself. He has translated and published the poetic works of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale. His honors as a poet include a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship, and his activities include having been poetry editor for The Paris Review for ten years, and being an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. He has published poems in literary journals and magazines including Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The Nation and the Poetry Foundation website.

Galassi began his publishing career as an editorial intern at Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1973. He moved to Random House in New York, and then in 1986 to Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), after being fired from Random House. Two years later, he was named editor-in-chief, and served as the president and publisher at FSG until 2018. He was succeeded as Publisher by Mitzi Angel in 2018, and Angel was named President in 2021. Galassi is currently the Chairman and Executive Editor.

Galassi was born in Seattle (his father worked as an attorney for the Justice Department), but he grew up in Plympton, Massachusetts. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he became interested in poetry, writing and literature. He attended Harvard College, where he studied English with instructors including Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and served as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon and the president of the Harvard Advocate. He graduated in 1971, then became a Marshall Scholar at Christ's College, Cambridge. He realized while attending Christ’s College that he wanted a career in book publishing.

Jonathan Galassi (born 1949 in Seattle, Washington) has served as the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is currently the Chairman and Executive Editor.