Who

Spiegel, the co-editorial director of Spiegel & Grau, is the editor behind runaway successes like Native Speaker and The Kite Runner.

Backstory

A native New Yorker, Celina "Cindy" Spiegel attended Brearley, Bronx Science and Penn before a three-year stint with Random House's now-defunct college division. She decamped to California to earn a master's at UC Berkeley, and returned to settle in New York at the age of 29. Not long after establishing herself as an editor at Ticknor & Fields, she was recruited by Penguin's Susan Petersen Kennedy to run a new imprint, Riverhead Books. In 2006, she traded up again—she and Julie Grau were hired by then-Doubleday president Steve Rubin to form yet another new imprint, Spiegel & Grau. In December '08 the imprint became part of the Random House rather than the Doubleday division amid mass restructuring at the company.

Of note

Spiegel's list includes financial guru Suze Orman, novelist Sara Gruen (whose next two books were acquired for $5 million), debut novelist Janelle Brown, and Rebecca Stott, the British author of Ghostwalk. Spiegel raised the stakes considerably in the blogger book deal game when, while still at Riverhead, she signed up ex-Wall Streeter and author of the blog D-Nasty Dana Vachon for a staggering $650,000 two-book contract. Mergers & Acquisitions was published in April 2007 to hype, launch parties and a movie deal, albeit mediocre sales and a conspicuous absence of critical praise. Recent books Spiegel has acquired include education guru Dr. Mel Levine's Brains Making Gains, about childhood brain development; and British Buddhism authority Stephen Batchelor's Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, a personal and historical look at Buddha.

Personal

Spiegel is married to Peter Kupfer. In romantic fashion, they edited a book together in 1992, Great First Lines: Literature's Most Memorable First Sentences. They have a son and daughter and live on the Upper West Side. They also have a summer house in Amagansett.