Alia Hanna Habib of The Gernert Company
“I often advise writers to avoid opening their proposals with a description or synopsis of the book, which is the format you usually see when you Google ‘book proposal.’
Agents & Editors Recommend
A dependable source of professional and creative advice, this regular series features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.
Sean Sam of 128 Lit
“Consider how you might sidestep tired tropes...and create a text that resists oppressive tradition while pulsing with joy and its painful entanglements.
Sarah Ghazal Ali of West Branch
“Write into what compels you, but reach behind your initial thought, behind the initial impulse toward a certain image or phrase.
Nicole W. Lee of Four Way Review
“The most vital element is that you’ve spent the time to percolate your voice and your poems...
Susan Antolin of Acorn
“Haiku that hint at a connectedness between the outer and inner worlds, elevate a sense of awe or wonder, and draw our attention to small details of everyday life...are all qualities of great haiku.”
Dominick Knowles of Protean
“We are all writing and editing in a time of ongoing political, economic, and—by extension—literary crises.
Max Pasakorn of Kopi Break
“I’d likely warm up to a poem that is aware of its potential synergy with other poems in the magazine or with contemporary global conversation.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan of the Paterson Literary Review
“I have always had a very clear picture of the kind of writing I want to publish in my journal.
Dana Isokawa of the Margins
When I edit a piece, whether it is an essay, article, or poem, I latch on to a writer’s transitions and section breaks. In these leaps, I often detect the joints in a writer’s logic, hear their voice, and observe them negotiating the said versus the unsaid. I find that a strong transition leaves space for the ideas of the preceding stanza or section to bloom in a reader’s mind. It can be a stretch of quiet before shifting to a different register, time, or phase of an argument.
Maya C. Popa of Publishers Weekly
Whenever I am asked to speak publicly on editing, I sense the audience’s hope for a formula or key: as straightforward as how to write a winning cover letter or as inscrutable as which week of the submission period to hit Send. However, so much of what I teach in my courses and write about in my newsletter comes down to mindset, not craft, and certainly not insider information.