Editing is a vocation providing so much good company, variety, and intellectual nourishment that I have done it for twenty years now. In graduate school as the poetry editor of the Greensboro Review I was smitten and went on to copyedit several magazines before becoming the managing editor of the Sewanee Review for eleven years. Before and around that time I edited more than fifty books at Duke University Press as well as grants for the Duke University Medical Center. Some of my favorite jobs in publishing, however, were freelance: doing research for Russell Banks’ next novel, gathering permissions for Daniel Halpern at Ecco, and assisting Peter Guzzardi in the fields of memoir and contemporary religion.
But first I was a poet, and continue to be. I’ve published in many magazines as well as two full collections and a chapbook with small presses. Over the years I’ve spent time in artists’ residencies in the midwest and southeast; I advised an artists’ colony and worked for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for nearly a decade. With very little guidance or intention my life has become embedded in the literary culture. I am a local and know what it takes to carve out the writers’ life and what is needed to maintain it in terms of publishing. Each time I submit my work to a magazine, I am keenly aware that I work from both sides of the editors’ desk. I like to think that with freelance editing, you and I are on the same side of that desk.
In addition to all that, I live in Sewanee, Tennessee with the writer, Kevin Wilson, and our lovely sons, Griff and Patch.