About Me

Whenever I’m asked why I love being an editor, I say that it’s like raising your hand in English class to say you’d change something in a book… and having the author listen to you! An editor is an empowered reader. Most avid book lovers would delight in having that opportunity.

I took my first creative writing course as a senior in college, and it scared me. I suddenly worried, did I want to be a writer? I was an English major, but it wasn’t just reading that I loved. I loved words and overthinking why an author chose them; I loved dissecting the relationships between characters as if they were friends to gossip about. I get so deeply involved in an engaging novel that it can hurt. (A silly but clear example: after Voldemort came back in the fourth Harry Potter book, I got so upset that it took me another five years to face the next three installments.) I focused on creative writing in graduate school, where I came to a very expensive realization: to be a writer, you have to want to write. I didn’t want to write. But I did want to work with writers on their stories, ask them why they chose their words, dig deeper into character, plot, and all the rest of it. I wanted to become an editor.

After receiving my undergraduate degree from The George Washington University (which included a year studying abroad at Pembroke College, Oxford University) and my graduate degree from The University of Chicago, I started my publishing career with an internship at Browne & Miller Literary Associates in Chicago. I moved to New York and got my first full-time editorial job at Random House with Doubleday Broadway’s Morgan Road Books imprint, followed by the Crown Publishing Group. In 2008, I went to Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, part of Penguin Group (USA), where I started to focus on fiction for the first time. Most recently I worked at Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, where I acquired and edited books for the Viking, Penguin Books, and Plume lists. In 2014, I left the corporate publishing world to pursue what I  love to do full-time: edit books.

In 2017, I moved from Brooklyn to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I live with my husband, our baby boy, a grumpy terrier, and a blue Pacific Parrotlet.

Photo by Eric Westpheling

Photo by Eric Westpheling