Adam Rosen – Editor

I'm a freelance developmental editor and line editor who has worked on the editorial side of print and online publishing since 2008. Before I became a full-time freelancer in 2016, I held in-house positions at HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, and Soomo Learning. I'm also a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course, the six-week publishing certificate program overseen by the Columbia University School of Journalism. My book on the cult film The Room, You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!: The Year's Work on The Room, the Worst Movie Ever Made, will be published by Indiana University Press in October 2022.

I've worked on over 50 nonfiction books as a freelancer. In 2021, one of the books I edited, To be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice, and Purpose by Ron Carucci (Kogan Page), was named one of Bloomberg's best books of the year. In 2024, another title, Leaders Leap: Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption by Steve Dennis (Wonderwell), earned a starred review in Library Journal. Other books I’ve edited have received reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.

Simply put, I have the experience and training to make your writing as effective as it can possibly be.

I specialize in:

- helping authors conceptualize, organize, and revise their work, with the end result that their manuscript feels deliberate and unified from beginning to end

- ensuring that each paragraph and sentence in the manuscript progresses logically

- improving text within the context of the author's genre (making wordy sections more concise, calling attention to sentences that are confusing or potentially difficult for a reader to understand, identifying gaps in logic, etc.) while preserving the author's voice and the tone of the manuscript

I began my career at the late, great Collins nonfiction imprint of HarperCollins, where I worked directly under the publisher on various mass-market titles. I moved into scholarly publishing in 2009. As an associate editor at Oxford University Press in New York City, I commissioned and edited contributions to the press’s flagship online references, Oxford Biblical Studies Online, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, and the Oxford African American Studies Center, a collaboration with Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute.

In 2012, I left New York for Asheville, North Carolina, where for four years I worked as an editor and course designer at Soomo Learning, an independent online educational publisher. At Soomo, I created interactive digital anthologies in early and modern world literature and international development from scratch.

For the past decade and a half I’ve also been moonlighting as a journalist and essayist. Some of the places I’ve contributed to include the the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wilson Quarterly, the Awl, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, Literary Hub, the Baltimore Sun, the Onion, JSTOR Daily, Tablet Magazine, and many other print and online publications. In 2013 I contributed an essay on pulp literature to Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece (Voyageur Press).