My editorial career began in 2011 with the launch of Specter Magazine, a curated online literary website, inspired by my work as a columnist for PANK’s online blog. I wanted a place of my own to publish the work that spoke to me, driven entirely by a pure passion for literary experimentation and the principle of creating space to publish new, emerging writers from around the world. 

Simultaneously, I began my own publishing career, writing essays, columns, and short stories published online and in print, leveraging (unbeknownst to me at the time) a growing interconnected social network that introduced me to the best writers, editors, and thinkers. 

Editing and writing, then, became an interlocked literary process and philosophy. I founded “Regular Genius” in 2017 as the start of a new independent venture that would act as a laboratory (and necessary business entity) for new works, starting with co-writing LET LOVE HAVE THE LAST WORD, a New York Times bestselling memoir by the rapper/actor/award winner Common (Atria, 2018).

Meanwhile, I had a day job, starting in 2015 at Catapult when I became an editor for the company’s now-abandoned online magazine. I admit, this was fulfilling work that refined and sharpened and challenged my editorial process; editing narrative nonfiction by writers articulating and expressing life-changing events meant adopting a softness to the work, a “beginner’s mind” to quote Shunryu Suzuki. Rather than following a path that would elevate my personal sensibility to some notion of taste, I wanted to try to reduce myself, so to speak, to make space for the writers and their respective lives, to understand them as people and to then help them make sense of what they had written. 

This philosophy extended to editing books, beginning in 2017 with NIGHT CLASS: A MEMOIR by Victor P. Corona (Soft Skull Press) and RIDDANCE, a novel by Shelley Jackson (Black Balloon/Catapult). During my tenure at what became Catapult Book Group, including my run as editor in chief of Soft Skull Press from 2021 - 2024, some of my notable publications include: 

• The White Mosque: A Memoir by Sofia Samatar (2023 finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award); 

• The Survivalists: A Novel by Kashana Cauley; 

• the tenth anniversary reissue of Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, edited by Rebecca Walker; 

• Black Punk Now, edited by James Spooner and Chris L. Terry; 

• Users: A Novel by Colin Winnette (shortlisted for the 2024 PEN/Faulker Award for Fiction), 

• Under the Eye of the Big Bird: A Novel by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda (the UK version shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize) 

• Blue Hour: A Novel by Tiffany Clarke Harrison (A Barack Obama Summer Reading List selection for 2023)

• Code Noir: Fictions by Canisia Lubrin, with art by Torkwayse Dyson and a new foreword by Christina Sharpe (A Finalist for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize)

Now, I want to bring my editorial philosophy, practice, and experience to writers looking for guidance—whether it’s shaping a manuscript, refining a proposal, or just figuring out the next steps in your publishing journey. If you’ve got a story to tell, I’d love to help you tell it in the best way possible.