Of the many adjectives that describe Rakia Clark—sharp, ambitious, inquisitive—the one that might best express her career trajectory and her work as an editor, as well as what makes her an effective advocate for her authors, is intentional. Her acquisitions at Mariner Books, the imprint of HarperCollins where she has worked for three and a half years, the past year and a half as an executive editor, are a clear indicator of exactly that quality. She has ushered into print such recent notable books as Chinelo Okparanta’s acclaimed novel Harry Sylvester Bird (2022), Brian Broome’s award-winning memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods (2021), and Angela Chen’s probing nonfiction exploration Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020).

But even before she had secured her position as a top editor at a Big Five publishing house, back when she had no idea what she wanted to do after college, she was intentional in her journey. With the help of her counselor at the career development office at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, she determined exactly what she liked: books, words, ideas. Once she started talking about how much she enjoyed a junior-year seminar in which students wrote essays that would be shared among a small cohort, she realized that editing her fellow students’ words was something that came easy to her, natural even. For her it was essentially an Editing 101 course, even if she didn’t know that was what she was doing at the time. “But I loved it. I loved it,” Clark recalls. “And I was full of ideas, and this was fun to me. I’m grinning now just remembering it.”

Clark graduated from Haverford College in 2001, right as the dot-com bubble was bursting, and she knew that breaking into publishing was going to be challenging. It still is, of course, but in an unstable economy it was perhaps even more difficult that year. After twelve months spent back in her hometown of Atlanta, she moved to the capital of book publishing, New York City, and took the Columbia Publishing Course, a training ground for those interested in working in the industry. It was exactly the on-ramp she needed. “Everything started from that course,” she says. Not only did she receive an education in publishing, but she also received a crash course in making a life in the city. “It wasn’t tough mentally,” Clark says of the transition. “I wanted to spend my twenties in New York. I had watched all the movies, I had seen all the TV shows, and I thought, ‘Yeah, why not?’ I didn’t think I would stay, but I thought, ‘I’ll work in New York, hopefully in publishing, for a few years, spend my twenties here, and then I’ll figure out what I want to do when I turn thirty.’” She never left.

After completing the Columbia course, Clark fielded several job offers and took one as a rotational associate at HarperCollins, where she worked across departments. In this new role she received invaluable experience in publicity, sales, and marketing. While she knew publishing was the right industry for her, it wasn’t until she sat in her first editorial meeting that she realized it was her calling. “I had to be in the meeting and hear how people were talking about books and see at what point in the process editorial was working before I knew that,” Clark says. “No one could have explained it to me.”

In 2005 she moved to Viking, where she started acquiring books as an assistant editor, then took on an editor role at the independent press Kensington Publishing for two years before making a transition to freelance editing, which she did until 2015, when she was offered a senior editor position at Beacon Press in Boston. Four years later she took the position at Mariner. That sort of longevity as an editor, staying true to what delights and surprises, is rare, especially for women of color, who are often among the first to burn out and leave publishing.

I recently spoke with Clark about our hopes for the industry, those singular moments when we see a writer unlock something special in their own work, and what it takes for a writer to shine in a query.

How did you realize editing, reading, all of that was what you wanted to do?
I was an English major. Surprise, surprise. [In college] the centerpiece of the curriculum for English majors was this year-long class called the junior seminar—a class of fifteen students, three groups of five. And you would have to read the other students’ work. And then [outside of the regular class] you would have a weekly meeting where you’re giving each other notes. And I was really good at it. I was really, really good at it. I’m not a writer by any means. Well, none of the writers that I work with [now], I couldn’t touch them. But for academic undergraduate writing, I was pretty nice. And I was full of ideas, and this was fun to me.

And then everybody would read my work and they would have ideas and I would read their work and I would have even more ideas. That process I loved. And so, I was giving [the career development counselor] some version of that and just saying like, “I don’t want to be a teacher.” I said, “I know I don’t want to teach.” That’s the thing that everybody always goes to first. And I was like, “I don’t really want to be in advertising.” I kept pointing to the things I didn’t want to be, but I was using publishing words without saying the word publishing because I didn’t know that publishing existed.

I want to take us back to after you landed in New York and had just finished the Columbia Publishing Course. What did it take in 2002 to make it in the industry after all that?
Before the Columbia Publishing Course, I didn’t have a job lined up. But I bought a one-way ticket and I just figured, “Okay, I’ve got six weeks.” That’s how long the program runs. “I’ve got six weeks to figure it out.” And the course provides lodging and some meals. And I just figured I could figure it out after six weeks. And luckily at the end of the course I had a couple of job offers. So, it did work out, but it could very easily not have. My naivete, I think, worked to my benefit in that moment.

So, over the [duration] of the course, you’re meeting lots of people who work in publishing and many of them are very senior. And I don’t know if this is still how they do it, but the course was so revered at the time that people who had job openings would wait until the newest class of the Columbia Publishing Course students were finishing to hire from that class. And job openings were coming through all the time. That didn’t mean that they had to hire from the course, but they just often did. And at the same time, they were sending their job listings to Monster.com—I don’t even know if that’s right anymore! But Monster and MediaBistro and all these websites that people would go to if you wanted to break into publishing in New York. And it wouldn’t be like from corporate HR. The actual editors would call the course and say, “Hey, we’ve got an opening for a publicity assistant. We’ve got an opening for a marketing assistant. Do you have anybody who might be interested?” And we got first dibs on, well, at least a head start on what the openings were.

And there was also a woman who came through who helped us. She looked at your résumés and would help you to tailor it to the kind of job you were interested in. There was a senior vice president of HR who gave us an idea of what to expect. Job hunting wasn’t the main focus of the course, but I would probably say the last several days of the course were very geared towards that because the whole point was for you to get a job right out of it.

Had editorial always been what you wanted to break into in publishing? Or were there other kinds of jobs that you were like, “Oh, maybe I would want to do that as well?”
Yeah, editorial wasn’t the thing that I was set on. I didn’t understand enough about the industry to know what I was set on. When I first heard, when the woman from the career development office said, “Rakia, you might consider publishing. It sounds like what you’re saying is publishing.” I was like, “No, no, no. I don’t mean like cutting down trees.” I did not understand there was a whole business to creating books, to book production. It never even occurred to me. And so the idea that I would’ve understood editorial being different than publicity, being different than sales, being different than managing editorial.... I didn’t know what a literary agent was. I don’t know if I ever heard that phrase until the course. I wasn’t even that far down the road.

So when I took the course I just knew I was interested in publishing conceptually. And what the course did was it introduced me to Publishing 101. “This is what the business looks like in our country. It works a little bit differently in the other places, but in the United States, this is what it looks like. Here’s what each department does. Here’s how they work together. And depending on what you’re interested in, are you an introvert? Are you an extrovert? What kind of books do you like to read? How much free time do you want? Are magazines a better thing for you?” Online magazines were beginning to emerge as a thing.

And it sort of gave me a wide view of what all the options were. And I thought literary agenting was interesting, but I didn’t consider myself very entrepreneurial. And I thought, “Oh, you only take home what you hunt.” I was like, “Oh, that’s a little advanced for me.” And then I thought maybe marketing, because it seemed like a blend of the business and the art.

And I had a couple of job offers and the one that I took was as a rotational associate here at HarperCollins, in fact. And it let you rove across departments. And then when assistant jobs opened up, you got first dibs on them. And the reason I took that job over the editorial assistant offer I had was because I wanted to see what is it like to be in publicity, what it’s like to be in sales. And after my first editorial meeting, I think I was sitting in for an assistant who was on vacation or something for a couple days, so in my first editorial meeting, I was like, “Oh, yeah. We’re done.” Very clear. But I had to be in the meeting and hear how people were talking about books and see at what point in the process editorial was working before I knew that. No one could have explained it to me.

I love that. When you see people talk about books, that’s when it clicked for you.
Yes.

What would you say is your philosophy when it comes to editing?
I want the writers I work with to work at their full capacity, whatever that is. And everybody’s capacity is different. My ambition for each book I work on is to set out at the very beginning with my writer and say, “This is what we’re doing. We’ve all agreed that this is where we’re going to land.” And then I spend eighteen months, two years, sometimes longer, helping the writer get it there. And some writers don’t need as much help getting it there as others. And then some writers need more help than I expected getting it there. The most fun editorial experiences are when the writer has more capacity than I thought. That’s thrilling when I realize, “Oh. Oh.” And when that happens, it’s like, “Okay, we’re going to have some fun with this.”

Yes!
Because it’s like, “Well, I thought your capacity was here. You’ve already passed that. Let me just keep pushing and see how far—what can you really do?” And that’s rare when that happens. But when it happens, it’s thrilling.

That’s one of the best parts of being an editor, I think: finding that magic moment when they’re like, “I have something. I have an idea from what you said.” And it’s even greater than what you had imagined.
And sometimes we see that on submission. I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself when you’re reading something by a writer who’s never been published anyplace, [and it’s sent to you by] an agent who might be young or inexperienced or not at a fancy place or is using a P.O. box or has a Hotmail account. All of these things signal to us that this is probably going to be a no before we’ve even opened the attachment. And then you start to read the thing and you’re like, “Oh. Oh. Oh! Let’s go shopping.” That’s fun. That’s really fun.

What are you looking for that will give you one of those moments?
The writing has to be really good. It has to feel like something I’ve not read before, even if the topic is something that I have read about before. I see a lot of books about race and culture and music and fashion and feminism. And I see a lot of memoir. So it’s not that the topic itself needs to be new. What is really new? Very few things. But the treatment of it needs to feel new.

And I like to feel that the writer is telling me something about themselves, even if they’re not telling me something about themselves, where it makes me wonder where this person grew up. I wonder what they read. I wonder what they’ve experienced that makes them land here on this. I like that. I like that feeling a lot. That’s what makes something feel fresh and revelatory to me.

Even if it’s dealing with a topic that I’ve read about deeply or something that I might have even experienced myself, I’m interested in: How are you experiencing it, Vivian? We’re both in the same town, we went to the same school, work in the same industry, but you’re experiencing this differently because you’re in your skin. I [want to] feel whatever that experience is for you. Writers who can do that are really special.

What do you say when writers ask about trends or are worried about writing into a trend?
I tell them not to worry about it. If it’s good, it’s good. We might both be wearing jeans, but we look different in the jeans because our bodies are different. Just because somebody else has done it, was their version corny? Is your version better? And you have to be honest with yourself about that. I think sometimes writers are trying to avoid trends, but they also don’t have anything new to say about that trend.

It’s not interesting to read something that feels like a summation of other people’s work or a regurgitation of other people’s work. But if I can tell that you’ve engaged with all these other things and then you sat with it for a minute and then you were like, “Well, this is what I think about that.” Or, “What if we sprinkle this other thing in?” Or, “You know what? I’m going to turn this on its head and throw a wrench into this whole conversation.” So you’re talking about the same thing, but the angle on it is new. That’s fun.

I love that. You’re complicating the question. You’re complicating that thing you’re thinking about.
I love when writers are complicating narratives that are set for me. I don’t always like it personally. I’m like, “Oh, you’re making me think about that. I don’t want to. My opinion on this is firm. I know what I think. I know what I feel.” And then you read something about something and you’re like, “Wait a minute, you got a point here. Points were made.”

I don’t think anybody should be turned off on a subject because other people are writing about it, but then obviously you shouldn’t just try to jump on what other people are doing. That’s a quick way to get your work rejected.

What are some things you look for in a query letter that catch your eye when you open that e-mail from an agent?
The first thing that is important to me, and has become more important to me recently, is that you know what I work on. You know what I publish, and you know what I don’t publish. And if the query letter is communicating to me that you understand what it is that I do and you are sending me the submission because this fits what I do, that’s the bare minimum. Bare minimum. And if the query letter communicates to me one way or another, “Oh, you have no idea what I do,” we’re not starting off in a good place here, because it’s easy to find out what I do. It’s super easy.

And you don’t have to have a subscription to any place to find that. I have deliberately [shared it publicly] on my website. You can see what I do. So if I receive a query letter that isn’t in line with the kind of work that I’ve expressed a lot of interest in and published in the past, that’s annoying to me. Or if it is different in some way, explain to me why I should pay attention. You have to acknowledge that.

A query letter shouldn’t be overly long. And this is coming from agents, not unsolicited from writers. And then just tell me what it is, like, top line: This is a coming-of-age memoir. This is a story about environmental justice in places that we never discuss. Just tell me, “What is it?” And then follow that with a little bit of why you like it as the agent. Why were you drawn to this? And then attach it.

Are accolades important for a writer to have?
Not always. They were to me a few years ago. I’m less impressed by them now. And not because they’re not impressive; they are impressive, but that doesn’t mean the writing is good. Just tell me what it is, why you like it, why you think I’m going to like it, and attach the proposal or attach the manuscript. If it comes with a big blurb or with tons of accolades, it will make me look at it faster. Because I know what that means for other people, and it’s like, “Oh, everyone’s going to be looking at this faster, so I should look at this faster.” But it doesn’t make me want it any more. It doesn’t mean anything to me in terms of the quality of the submission, but it can put it on the top of the pile.

What would you give as advice to writers who are just starting to figure out what their story is?
Read, read, read, read, read. And this is not new advice, Vivian!

I know!
This is probably advice you give out yourself, too. Read, read, read, read, read, read. You cannot read too much. You cannot read too much. You’re going to read things that are so good that you’re going to be mad. You’re going to be like, “Oh, man, I should never write anymore.” And then you’re going to read things and you’re like, “This sold for what? I am way better than this writer.” And you’re going to feel heartened and renewed and encouraged to go back and work on your own stuff.

But the most important quality, in my opinion, for writers: If you call yourself a writer, you have to be reading. And who are your contemporaries? Who are your ancestors? Who are you writing in the tradition of? You’re not this person, but a very skilled, learned, well-read person could track from that to you. You need to know what that is, and deeply. And who are your peers? Who are the writers who are writing in the same space you are? And how are you similar to them? Which is great. And how are you different than them? Which is better. You need to know. And this isn’t just for marketing purposes; obviously it matters for that, too, but you need to know what space you occupy and how you relate to the people who occupy similar space, past and present.

We both had similar starts in that we both didn’t really know what publishing was when we started. Were you surprised by the gender, racial, class backgrounds you encountered when you entered publishing? Did it feel surprising to you? Or was it something that you were like, “This makes a lot of sense.”
I was not surprised at all. No, not at all. Not at all. I don’t know that anybody explicitly told me what to expect, but they didn’t need to. I’ve looked like this the whole time, you know what I mean? I was spoon-fed, from the moments of my earliest memories, what to expect from this world. And that is exactly what I got. And it wasn’t communicated to me to discourage me from trying anything, or from feeling free, or from making choices that were beyond whatever stereotypes people might have for me; it was so that I would have the knowledge.

And I heard this from everybody. “You need to know. You need to know what is out there. And then you can decide how you’re going to move in it. But you need to know. Baby, you need to know.” I heard this from my teachers. I heard this from my parents. I heard this from my aunties and my uncles. I heard this from the parents of my friends, from the dentist, from the doctor, from the postman. Everybody said, “This is what you’re probably going to be facing.” And it’s not like the rest of America is one thing and publishing is different. There are very few spaces where it’s not like this in one way or another. So I wasn’t surprised at all.

And how do you feel you’ve been able to navigate this space? Again, the space is no different from other spaces, but I think publishing, especially, is seen as this well-read, liberal beacon, but racially the way people act is no different.
Right. The way people act is no different. The way is no different. I grew up in Georgia, and my perspective was really clear. It was, “Rakia, we’re going to prepare you. We’re going to make you big and strong, because there’s a thing that’s going to happen when you leave where we are.”

So when I left where I was and went out into the world, what I got is exactly what everybody said was going to happen, so there was no surprise for me. And the fact that publishing is an industry that’s about culture and art, and it’s highbrow and all those things: So? That doesn’t make any difference. I gave publishing as an industry no credit there. I didn’t expect it to be any different. So when it wasn’t, it wasn’t.

What did surprise me was that my talent and my promise as a young editor was seen but not protected. That surprised me. That was different from what I had experienced. People saw. They saw the talent and they saw the promise. And I expected a little bit more protection so that I could be here. And that did not happen. And that surprised me. That broke my heart. And that breaks my heart because it still happens today.

Now you’re at a level where you can be that kind of protector in some ways. And how do you see your position? What does that mean to you?
It means everything to me. It means everything to me. I thought that some things about my experience in publishing would change once I got promoted. With each promotion, I thought, “Oh, that won’t be a thing now.” And your promotion doesn’t solve those problems. You’re just in a different room dealing with those problems. And one of the things that I’m reckoning with myself now is: The problems that I thought I wouldn’t have—which was naive—I still have, but I also have more power, but not as much power as people probably think I have. But when I see someone who needs protection in the way that I know I needed protection, how can I give it in a way that they want to receive?

Because when I was coming along it, it was just a different time. And I think that you have to be willing to accept protection from the person who’s giving it to you. And I’m also trying to find ways, not just with passing projects on to other editors who I think are really smart and available, but pulling them, in a way. And sometimes they don’t want to be pulled for their own reasons that are valid. Sometimes I understand it, sometimes I don’t understand it. But they also have expectations of me that sometimes I understand and sometimes I don’t understand.

So I’ve got more power, but not as much power as I think it seems sometimes. I’m trying to do my job, but I’m also contending with the same issues that everybody else is contending with.

But it means something to me, like when I launch a list or when there’s a situation where I’m visible to my peers and to the company, my colleagues, in a way. And I get e-mails: “Hi, I saw you. I was just so glad to see you, to see somebody who looks like me, running the room, doing the thing.” That means everything to me.

And I’m hyperaware of that as I’m working all the time. Do you feel that way too?

I do. I feel like I want to go to all the coffee meetups. I want to do all the informational phone calls. I want to give that advice. But I don’t want to dictate what you should be doing either—or even worse, scare you off. Just because this thing happened to me doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to happen to you. And just because I was burned in this way doesn’t mean that you’re going to be burned in this way. And I want you to be open to all experiences without getting hurt either. But it’s a lot of pressure, because you also want to do your job and do it well and stay here.
Yeah. I’m in a hurry for people who are hungry to get good really quickly, because I need them for my books. Can you hurry up and become director please? Can you hurry up and lead the department please? Can you hurry up and do that? Because I need you, because you understand this culturally or you understand, I don’t know what you call it, but you understand; you are sympathetic in a way because you’ve been raised in an environment where that’s the status quo. You don’t have the expertise yet. So hurry up and get the expertise. Can you promise me you’ll get amazing at the job? Because you’re amazing already as yourself.

I think about how there are so few of us and I feel like we’re always in constant conversations with one another, whether we know it or not, whether explicitly or just in the ether. So I am very grateful to have that. And I wish there were more.
Yeah, but the thing is, Vivian, there are more now than there were before. That’s the thing. Right now is the most there’s ever been.

Very true.
And if you look at the group of people who are coming, it’s more of them. So it’s so important to keep them. And we’re not going to keep them all, because some of them are looking at this whole thing and being like, “You know what? I’m going to fill out this grad school application, take out another a hundred thousand dollars in student loans. That’s a better option than being here.”

What do you think it will take for us to retain as many talented young people as we can?
Publishers have to give a shit. Publishers have to care. You can’t do this, Vivian. I can’t do this. My editorial department can’t do this. The company has to care. It has to be more than, “Here’s a speaker who’s coming in to talk about that.” Thank you, but you have to care about the humanity of the employees you have. If we didn’t make any more recruitment efforts, but we retained everybody we have, that would solve this problem ten times over.

We should keep [BIPOC] recruitment efforts going. But if you’re recruiting people, it’s like filling a bag with liquid, but there’s a hole at the bottom. Publishing has a hole at the bottom of this bag and it keeps thinking, “Well, let me just keep filling it.” And it’s like, “Can you tuck in something through the holes?” And you think because the hole is at the bottom, no one can see it. Well, there are a lot of us who see it and are pointing our fingers at it and being like, “Hey, I can’t hold this myself.” Publishers have to want to do this. And they can if they want to.

The retention issue is where I am particularly concerned because I’m looking at these people and if I’m experiencing what I’m experiencing, I know they’re experiencing some version of this, but with much, much less power to do anything about it, much, much less agency. And are they going to stick around for fifteen years muddling through this? I did. Most people don’t.

You did freelance editing for six years, right?
Yep. I wanted to go back in-house, but I didn’t have a strong acquisitions record at that point. I’d been an assistant for a few years and then I was at a smaller indie place for a couple years, but I didn’t acquire much there. It was a tough job for me.

And then I freelanced for a long time. The recession happened and I lost my job, along with a third of editors. A third of all editors got laid off at the same time so there were fewer places to go for a stretch. And then when places started hiring again, they wanted people who had strong acquisitions records. And I understand that, but I was like, “But I’m really smart and you need me and I feel my taste has not changed. It’s been the same since [I started].”

I was going to ask.
It’s the exact same. It’s just now people are paying attention to it more. And there are books that have been published into that space that have been successful, and so now the publishers want them. But there was a period where even if a publisher did want the kind of books that I do, I hadn’t published them yet. I had not done it yet. And so, I just found it really difficult to find a job in-house, and when Beacon Press reached out to me out of the blue, completely out of the blue, and said, “This is what we’re doing, and we’ve been asking around and your name keeps coming up. Do you want to talk about it?” I was like, “Hell yeah, I want to talk about it!” And I ended up getting that job. And that was what put me back on the radar of the industry. I’d sort of been on the outskirts for a while.

What are you excited about for 2023?
I’ve got five books coming out, three on the summer list and two on the fall. My summer list is particularly swaggy. All of 2023 for me feels pretty swaggy. So, the first book is called An Amerikan Family by Santi Elijah Holley. And it’s about Shakurs, this loose collective of people between New York and Baltimore who really are the flip side of the Kennedys. If you track the individual people in that collective, it tells you everything you need to know about Black liberation over the past fifty years. And so, Tupac Shakur is a Shakur. Assata Shakur is a Shakur, Tupac’s mother Afeni Shakur is the baddest bitch you ever seen on the planet. And it looks at not just the three of them, but this collective and what they did. They did some things that were wonderful, and they did some things that were unforgivable. They were a complicated group but fighting all in the name of Black Liberation. And that book is coming out this summer. It feels very special to me. That’s a book that editorially surpassed the capacity thing that I was talking about. When I was reading the first full draft I was like, “Oh, oh, let’s go!” The author is not shy. He delivered early. You could tell that he just locked in. Reading it, I could see that he had locked in and he knew it. He knew he had something, and then I read it and then I knew he had something. And we’ve got this fantastic cover and I think we’re going to print a lot of copies. And now it’s just hoping that we find the audience for it.

And then I’m publishing a book about abuse and harassment in Hollywood by a Vanity Fair writer named Maureen Ryan. It’s called Burn It Down. It’s not looking at one bad man, it’s looking at [how] Hollywood, institutionally, systematically, is set up for this and how did that happen? What does that look like in practice? And what are some things that are going to be happening in the future to try to combat it?

And then I’ve got a book by Wesley Lowery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. And his book is called American Whitelash, a book about white America’s response to President Obama’s 2008 presidential election and all of the violent white rage that was in response to it. But Wesley’s focus is on the narrative of the families left behind and the communities left behind. So, he’s not focused very much on the crimes, he’s focused on where is this coming from for white people and how is this affecting, how is their grievance? What does it look like in real communities?

And then I am also working on a book with Alua Arthur; she’s a death doula, and people are like, “Death doula, what’s that?” People understand what a birth doula is, but because our country is less religious than it’s ever been, people are looking for traditions and they’re looking to have something at the end of their lives that can help them sort of organize their affairs and also be at peace. And so, in the same way that people are hiring birth doulas to help them bring life into the world, there are also people who are hiring death doulas to help them wrap up their affairs, to help them mend relationships, to help them just come to terms with where they are at the end of their lives. It’s beautiful.

What do you hope to see in the future of our industry?
I love seeing people get promoted. When I see brown and Black folks getting that first promotion, getting that second promotion, getting that promotion to full publicist, full marketing, full editor, I’m like, yes! I need you to get good as quickly as you can because I need you to be either working on my books or helping to inform the people who are working on my books. Nothing excites me more than that, people sticking around and getting promoted.
 

Vivian Lee is a writer and a senior editor at Little, Brown.