Sheri Dew

Thirty-five stores. About 775 employees. A chief executive, Ronald A. Millett, who had held the job since 1983 and was leaving in July to preside over a mission. That was Deseret Book on March 13, 2002, the day Sheri Dew became its president and chief executive. Board chairman Robert H. Garff, the same Garff who had hired Mitt Romney for the Salt Lake Olympics three years earlier, said: "Sheri's expertise and foresight will be invaluable as she directs Deseret Book's future growth and development." Ten years on, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter wrote that the publisher had been flailing when she took it and that she had pulled it out of the red.

She had not come up through retail. After a history degree at Brigham Young University, with an emphasis in American religious history, and USO tours as a pianist, she took an assistant editor's job at Bookcraft in 1978, moved to This People magazine in 1981 as editor and associate publisher, and joined Deseret Book in 1988 as an associate editor. Director of publishing came in 1989, vice president of publishing in 1993, executive vice president in 2000. The pattern is a publisher's ladder, rung by rung, with the CEO title at the top of it.

Deseret Book is a wholly owned subsidiary of Deseret Management Corporation, the for-profit holding company of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and its expansion under Dew has come by acquisition and by new formats rather than by store count, which has stayed close to where it started.

The Seagull deal was the largest and the one that has aged least well. Buying the competing chain in 2006 gave Deseret Book two brands in the same small market, and in April 2025 the company said it would close every Seagull store by year-end. Excel, by contrast, put a Church-owned company into the film business, and the Bookshelf app, which Dew has said changed the way she studies, turned a bookstore into a searchable library. The magazine LDS Living and a digital division round out the group. Revenue figures are not published; Deseret Management is private and the sources give none.

Every book Dew has written has been published by Deseret Book, which raises a question about conflicts that nobody in Salt Lake seems to ask, and which is at least worth stating. The list begins with Sharlene Wells, Miss America (1985) and Ezra Taft Benson: A Biography (1987), written while she was at This People and just before she joined Deseret Book. Go Forward with Faith, the authorized biography of Gordon B. Hinckley, followed in 1996; Insights from a Prophet's Life: Russell M. Nelson in 2019. Three authorized biographies of three presidents of the Church, by the executive who runs the Church's own publisher, is a concentration of access no secular house could match. In between came the devotional titles that sell to the same customers who walk into her stores: No Doubt About It (2001), No One Can Take Your Place (2004), If Life Were Easy, It Wouldn't Be Hard (2005), God Wants a Powerful People (2007), Women and the Priesthood (2013, revised 2021), Worth the Wrestle (2017), Prophets See Around Corners (2023). The Church called her to the general Relief Society presidency in April 1997 as second counselor to Mary Ellen W. Smoot, the first unmarried woman in that position, and she served until 2002, the year she became CEO; in 2003 a writer called her the most prominent single Latter-day Saint woman of the moment, a line Wikipedia still leads with. Since 2009 she has interviewed Church figures for the Church's Conversations program. She sits on the board of Bonneville International, the Church-owned broadcaster, and at Deseret Management Corporation she is executive vice president and chief content officer, which puts the biographer, the publisher, the bookseller and the broadcaster's director in one chair. Her own explanation for the career, given in interviews, goes back to a grain farm outside Ulysses, Kansas, where she was born on November 21, 1953, drove a tractor as soon as she could reach the pedals and, by her account, averaged 23 points and 17 rebounds a game in high school basketball; she has also said she is innately shy and that interviewing people for a living is what got her past it.

Nearly 50,000 children's books shipped abroad by 2011, from one 1999 trip to Ghana.

After a 1999 trip to Ghana she started Chapters of Hope, which had shipped close to 50,000 children's books to Ghana, the Pacific Islands, Russia, Eastern Europe and Zimbabwe by 2011. In March 2003 the White House named her to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and in 2004 she opened the Republican National Convention with a prayer, after asking herself, she said, whether it would look too partisan. One controversy sits on the record: at a Washington, D.C. interfaith meeting on February 28, 2004, she cited a 1941 Dorothy Thompson line about standing for or against Hitler to argue that neutrality on the family was not possible, drew a statement of outrage from Affirmation and a call from the Human Rights Campaign for President Bush to repudiate her, and said in April 2005 that Hitler was irrelevant to the point she had been making (Deseret News, via Wikipedia). She has said she leans Republican on social issues, has voted for Democrats "many, many times", and has turned down requests to run for office because she is too shy to ask for votes. Deseret Book gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award for innovation and creativity in 2009. Wikipedia still lists her as CEO in 2026, with Laurel C. Day as the company's president, twenty-four years after the board handed her 35 stores.