Poets & Writers Theater

In this installment of the PBS American Masters documentary series Renegades, which highlights the cultural contributions of little-known historical figures with disabilities, the series spotlights the life and career of editor Judy-Lynn del Rey who revolutionized the world of science fiction by editing and publishing books from writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and George Lucas.

In this virtual event hosted by the Strand Book Store, Sue Shapiro, author of The Forgiveness Tour: How to Find the Perfect Apology (Skyhorse, 2021), leads a conversation about best practices for pitching, submitting, and querying with agents and editors including Miya Lee, Rakesh Satyal, and Howard Yoon.

Writers and editors Victor Dwyer and Charlotte Gill discuss how they determine good writing from bad writing, what they look for in a first read, and the changing landscape of writing in this 2014 conversation moderated by journalist Ian Brown at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada. “There’s the sense that the writer is being completely frank with their audience and yet at the same time, they’re completely in control and utterly trustworthy,” says Gill.

“He does the work. I do the cleanup, and we fight.” Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is a documentary directed by Lizzie Gottlieb exploring the remarkable fifty-year relationship between Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb, and the art of editing.

“This whole thing has been a great big fat lesson in just be yourself.” In this Center for Fiction event, Dawn Winter talks about writing her debut novel, Sedating Elaine (Knopf, 2022), with her editor Jenny Jackson, vice president and executive editor at Knopf.

“A lot of my life has been unconventional, but it has led to this point and I wouldn’t have reached this point if I’d given up.” In this Penguin Books UK video, Booker Prize–winning author Bernardine Evaristo speaks with her longtime editor Simon Prosser about her writing career and books, including her new memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Grove Press, 2022).

In this National Centre for Writing video, Hannah Chukwu, assistant editor at Penguin Random House’s imprint Hamish Hamilton, speaks about receiving submissions from agents, pitching, and the editing process for the literary fiction and nonfiction authors she has worked with, including Bernardine Evaristo, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith.

“I come here to talk about metaphor, language, and reality—not too ambitious.” In this 2013 TEDx Talk, the late Daniel Menaker speaks about his mother, who was an editor at Fortune magazine, his love of language, the significance of metaphor, and how phrases become clichés. The venerable writer and editor died at the age of seventy-nine on October 26, 2020.

Author, editor, and agent Betsy Lerner talks to her mother, the inspiration behind Lerner's latest memoir, The Bridge Ladies, published in May by Harper Wave.

It was truly inevitable that publishing folks would get a hold of this particular meme. And so, here we have it: "(The Inevitable) Sh*t Agents and Editors Say," starring agents Michelle Brower and Brandi Bowles and editor Katie McHugh.