For nearly fifteen years I've worked in literary publishing. Most recently I was editor-in-chief of Soft Skull Press, where I built a list of literary, independent, and international writers, including Canisia Lubrin's Code Noir, winner of the Carol Shields Prize; Colin Winnette's Users, a PEN/Faulkner finalist; and Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird, shortlisted for the International Booker.

Before Soft Skull I was an editor at Catapult, acquiring fiction and nonfiction and commissioning essays across cultural criticism and personal narratives. I'm the co-writer, with Common, of the New York Times bestselling memoir Let Love Have the Last Word, and earlier I founded the literary magazine Specter.

I write as well as edit — cultural criticism and literary nonfiction — and I'm at work on my own first book. That double life, on both sides of the page, is what the studio is built on: I know what it takes to make a manuscript, and what it takes to bring one to market.