About

A Selection of Books I've Worked On

The Long Version

(in exactly 643 words!)

I suppose it all started my sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania. I had to declare a major, and I knew I needed to pick something my parents could imagine as having career prospects. I chose psychology.

In the meantime, I was always helping roommates and friends write their papers, so I applied for Writing Across the University, a program at Penn that trained undergraduates to tutor fellow students in dorms during evening and weekend hours. I was accepted and served as a writing advisor until I graduated in 1992.

I interviewed with Random House my senior year and was asked back for a second round, but I decided to spend a year in post-Velvet Revolution Prague instead. While in Prague, I taught English for Berlitz, wrote book reviews for the expat paper Prognosis, and became acquainted with Václav Havel’s editor. Havel, a famous dissident and accomplished playwright and essayist, was the president of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) at the time.

In 1993 I moved to New York City, where I met with Havel’s American editor at Knopf. Knopf didn’t have any open positions at the time, but she made a number of introductions that led to my first job as an editorial assistant at Houghton Mifflin.

I went on to work in senior editorial and management positions at Harcourt, as well as several different divisions of Penguin Random House. I then spent five years as the publisher of Open Road Integrated Media, where our mission was to reissue the works of great writers and introduce them to new generations of readers. In 2018 I moved to the other side of the desk and became a literary agent, first at Union Literary in New York, and then at the Ross Yoon Agency in Washington, D.C.

Book publishing is a wild and wonderful business and everyone in it—from sales reps, publicists, and marketers to contract directors, production managers, and cover designers—loves books. Editors play a central role in pulling it all together. In addition to their purely editorial work, they schmooze with agents, write descriptive copy, craft pitches for the sales force, and much more. I loved all of it, but the editorial work was my passion. That’s where I find my flow—in working with writers to draw out their best on the page.  Now, as an independent editor and coach, I get to devote myself to it full-time.

I’ve had the privilege of working with many critically acclaimed and bestselling authors. As a young editor, I published Colson Whitehead’s debut novel, The Intuitionist, which was named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years, and served as the in-house editor for the annual story anthology of O. Henry Prize winners. More recently, in my role as an agent, I represented Mateo Askaripour, whose debut novel, Black Buck, was a New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick.

In non-fiction, I worked with animal welfare pioneer and autism advocate Temple Grandin on Animals Make Us Human, with DeafBlind activist and National Book Award finalist John Lee Clark on How to Communicate: Poems and Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays, and CNN Hero of the Year Dr. Kwane Stewart on What It Takes to Save a Life: A Veterinarian’s Quest for Healing and Hope.

A few personal details: I love Chase’s Cherry Mash candy, Richard Long’s land art, and L’Ecole No. 41 Chenin Blanc. I played golf on my high school team and darts in the C Division of the New York Dart League, but I can no longer hit the broad side of a barn with either a golf ball or a dart. After twenty-six years in New York, I moved to Washington, D.C., where I enjoy walking my sweet dog and exploring the marvelous independent bookstores around town.