A colleague once described me as “curious, rigorous, and collaborative” and that feels pretty true.

I love helping authors amplify their unique voices, and I love a good challenge. For me, everything starts with understanding who your readers are and what they want from you; that’s where I bring the most value. I’m scrappy but disciplined, principled but open-minded, and utterly enchanted by the role that books play in our culture and our economy.

As the first book editor hired at Callisto Media, I helped build a nonfiction book publishing startup that used big data from websites like Google and Amazon to understand readers’ needs in order to write and publish better books. I spent nearly ten years growing that company from $0 to $100 million in annual revenue. Along the way, I edited countless bestsellers across a wide range of nonfiction topics. We eventually sold that startup to Penguin Random House.

As an editor at Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world, I edited renowned authors such as Steven Pinker and John McWhorter. And as the books editor at a literary website called The Rumpus, I published a diverse group of novelists and essayists at the leading edge of the American literary scene. In my spare time I founded an award-winning small press that specializes in literary criticism because I love literary criticism and it rarely gets the credit it deserves. I hold a Masters degree in publishing and writing from Emerson College in Boston.

Authors I edited have won the Pulitzer Prize and PROSE Awards; have been longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and finalists for the Hugo Award; have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and on Stephen Colbert’s show; have been #1 Amazon bestsellers; and have sold over 500,000 copies.

I work with a group of senior figures from the publishing industry to increase the visibility and sales of books by Black authors and serve of the board of directors for Small Press Distribution, a venerable non-profit that enables books by small publishers to reach the shelves of major bookstores.