Instructors

Susan Allan is the managing editor of the American Journal of Sociology, published by the University of Chicago Press. She holds a BS from Illinois State University.

Tyler Balli is the editorial coordinator at Ohio University Press (OUP). At OUP he supervises all aspects of the editorial process, from manuscript cleanup to indexing. He specializes in working with scholarly material but has also edited fiction, trade nonfiction, poetry, scientific guide books, blog posts, and more. He has worked for a variety of publishers and holds a BA in history (with an editing minor) from Brigham Young University and an MA in history from Virginia Tech.

Sharon Brinkman is an editorial associate at the American Journal of Sociology. She has also worked as a manuscript editor at the Astrophysical Journal in the Press Journals Division. She is a freelance editor for several Elsevier medical journals, as well as for the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law and Economics. She has a BA and MA from the University of Chicago and a JD from Loyola.

Kelli Christiansen has spent more than two decades in publishing. She began as an acquisitions editor with Publications International, Ltd./Consumer Guide, where she edited books and magazines. Later, she served as a senior editor with McGraw-Hill and executive editor with ABA Publishing. In 2007, she launched editorial services company bibliobibuli. Over the years, she has acquired, developed, edited, or ghostwritten hundreds of books. She received a BA in journalism from Northern Illinois University.

Lily Davenport (she/her) is an incoming PhD student in fiction at the University of Cincinnati, and senior comics co-editor at Action, Spectacle!. Previously, she's been the fiction editor for Volume 46 of the Black Warrior Review (America's oldest graduate-student-run literary journal), a longtime editorial and acquisitions intern at the University of Alabama Press, and an editorial intern at the Sewanee Review. She has a BA in English from the University of the South, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Alabama.

David Davis is a research analyst at CCC, a major collective licensing organization. He blogs on copyright and licensing issues and previously held directorships in public libraries and corporate libraries. He holds joint Master’s degrees in library and information sciences and medieval European history from The Catholic University of America. He has also completed post-graduate course work at MIT and Simmons College.

Siobhan Drummond is an editorial and production consultant. She was previously the managing editor at Chiron Publications and Triumph Books, as well as the production manager at the University of Chicago Press and Northwestern University Press. She holds degrees in music theory from the University of Illinois.

Katherine Faydash is an editor and urban planner. She previously was an editor at Great Books Foundation, Loyola Press, and University of Chicago Press, and a practicum instructor for a course on human rights in Mexico at DePaul University’s College of Law. At UIC’s Great Cities Institute, she researched participatory budgeting in Chicago. Katherine has edited hundreds of books in her more than twenty years as a freelancer. As a planner and consultant, she helps clients translate and develop their vision and ideas into plans and guiding documents to facilitate communications with stakeholders and funders.

Kelly Finefrock is an editor specializing in scholarly material. She began her career in publishing as an editorial apprentice at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. From there, she joined the Manuscript Editing Department, Books Division, at the University of Chicago Press, working as an editorial assistant, then manuscript editor, and finally production editor. Kelly currently works at the University of Alabama Press as a project editor guiding books through the publication process from copyediting through the final stages of proof. She holds a BA and an MA in history from the College of William and Mary.

Vinita Hampton Wright recently retired from a thirty-year career as a book editor. She is the author of fiction and nonfiction books, including The Soul Tells a Story (InterVarsity Press, 2005) about the spiritual-creative process and The Art of Spiritual Writing (Loyola Press, 2013). She continues to write, edit, and offer retreats and workshops on creativity and writing.

Susan Karani is a manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press, where she has worked since 2008. In addition to her work at the press, she freelances regularly as a developmental editor, translation editor, and foreign-language proofreader; her client list comprises Brill, various publications at Columbia University, and Harvard University Press, including the Loeb and Murty Classical Libraries. Susan holds a BA and an MA from the University of Chicago, and an MA from Columbia University.

Christopher Lowe is the author of Those Like Us: Stories (SFASU Press) and three prose chapbooks, including A Guest of the Program, winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Prize. His writing has appeared widely in journals including Greensboro Review, Quarterly West, Booth, Yemassee, Third Coast, and Bellevue Literary Review. He taught for a decade in the MFA program at McNeese State University where he worked closely with writers on their manuscripts. As an editor, he has worked for numerous literary journals including Story Magazine, The McNeese Review, Midway Journal, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. Currently, he is a program adviser at Northern Illinois University.

Maia is a project editor at Northwestern University Press, where she supervises the publication of scholarly monographs as well as fiction in translation and poetry. In her last position as an editor at the Art Institute of Chicago, she worked on special exhibition catalogs and in-gallery labels and signage. She began her publishing career at the University of Chicago Press, where she worked as a manuscript editor in the Journals Division for two years and the Books Division for twelve years. She has a BA in history from the University of Chicago and an MA/MPhil in history from Columbia University.

Evan White is the managing editor of Social Service Review, published by UChicago's School of Social Service Administration and the University of Chicago Press. Before joining SSR he copyedited for academic publishers and worked as a developmental editor for novelists, memoirists, and scholars. He holds an MA in the humanities from the University of Chicago and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.