Penguin Life imprint the Open Field, launched in 2021 by journalist Maria Shriver with a focus on personal betterment and inspiration, has announced plans to expand its program. According to Brian Tart, president and publisher of Penguin Life, Viking, and Penguin Books, “the demand has exceeded our expectations, which is why we are moving from three books a year to 10 books a year. Wellness as a category is continuing to grow, and we want to meet the demand.”
The Open Field focuses on health, wellness, and self-help, with an emphasis on Shriver’s perspectives. “We look to publish books in the Open Field that Maria feels strongly about, so the imprint is very geared to her taste and sense of the market,” Tart said. Subject areas range from women’s issues to brain science to leadership, topics Shriver has explored as an NBC News anchor and founder of the digital publication the Sunday Paper and the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement.
Shriver worked with Tart and Penguin Life on her 2018 book I’ve Been Thinking…: Reflections, Prayers, and Meditations for a Meaningful Life, and that relationship led her to found the Open Field, whose name references a Rumi poem about possibility. She views her publishing role as “a dream come true. I’m proud of what this imprint has already become and what it can continue to become,” and she sees the imprint as “an extension of what I’ve been working in, whether it’s documentaries or nightly news pieces.”
She is looking for established as well as newer writers “who raise others up” and share positive advice. “I’m interested in individuals’ journeys of healing, and I’m interested in politics, but voices that are uniting as opposed to divisive,” Shriver said. The Open Field’s mission echoes Shriver’s Sunday Paper, some of whose contributors—including Stacey Lindsey and Meghan Rabbitt—have manuscripts in progress with the imprint. “We sell a lot of books through the Sunday Paper,” which serves as a promotional site too, Shriver added.
Shriver also foresees “an Open Field collective” of authors who celebrate each other’s work. “We’re trying to do things differently, and so everybody gets a packet outlining what it means to be an Open Field author: what they can expect from me, what we expect from them,” Shriver said. She intends “that the whole team will elevate other books” across newsletters, podcasts, and other channels as they “take their mission and their purpose out into the world.”
“As the collective grows, more and more authors will do that for the next book,” Shriver said. “We’re not in competition with one another. We’re in support of one another. And I think that that’s unique.”
Forthcoming titles include Banning Lyon’s The Chair and the Valley: A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and the Outdoors (out this week), journalist Steven Petrow’s The Joy You Make: Finding the Silver Linings—Even on Your Darkest Days (Sept.), and Martha Beck’s Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose (January 2025), Beck’s second title for the Open Field, after 2021’s best-selling The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self. Additional titles are on the way from Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, West Wing speechwriter Tom Rosshirt, and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, among others.
“I’m hopeful that all of the books that come out of the Open Field get people to think and perhaps change the trajectory of their own lives,” Shriver said. “As the media gets more and more fragmented, I look to The Open Field to be a home for books you can count on and voices you can trust.”