Overview
After thirty years as the acquiring editor for architecture and environment at the University of Virginia Press, I retired in July of 2020 and am now a freelance developmental editor / book doctor. In my former day job, I executed developmental edits on a number of the books I acquired --quite a few of them award-winning--and found the work to be one of the more rewarding aspects of a very rewarding job. My objective is never to turn out a manuscript that sounds like I wrote it: I always aim to make the author sound like the very best version of him- or herself.With regard to subject matter: I can work on most types of academic book projects in the humanities, but prefer to take on architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism manuscripts, especially those destined for publication by university presses. (I have also acquired both literary criticism and regional trade books, so I'm at ease working with projects in those genres.) I know the scholarly publishing world very well indeed, and can be quite helpful to a first-time author who's attempting to negotiate it. I am particularly good at assisting an author to turn a promising dissertation into a book, or a promising academic book into one that will reach a broader audience, either trade or crossover. I have also seen enough terrible query letters and proposals in my day to steer you away from making common mistakes. (Two quick hints: no playing around with fonts; no exclamation points.)As an editor, I'm straightforward, smart, confident, and logical, with an unusually broad frame of reference. If I don't think I can help you, I'll tell you so right up front: if we do decide to work together, I'll have your back all the way.
Services
Non-Fiction
Architecture
Humanities & Social Sciences
Languages
English (US)
Work experience
Self-employed
Apr, 1990 —
Jul, 2020
(about 30 years)
Longtime acquiring editor for a scholarly press. Smart and very experienced, excellent developmental editing skills, good contacts with other editors and presses in the field, and many award-winning books. Prefer to work on academic crossover titles; good with authors aiming to turn their dissertations into books.
Portfolio
In the nearly two centuries since the first building’s completion in Thomas Jefferson’s academical village, programs and facilities at the University of Virginia have been continually expanded and updated. This second edition of Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s The Uni... read more
The days of choosing between a handful of imports and a convenience store six-pack are long gone. The beer landscape in America has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century, as the nation has experienced an explosion in craft beer brewing and consumpti... read more
Micah LeMon had one slight problem when he started bartending nearly twenty years ago: he had no idea what he was doing. Mixology, he came to understand, is based on principles that are indispensable but not widely known. In The Imbible, LeMon shares the knowl... read more
Virginia's horse tradition goes back 400 years, to when horses accompanied some of the first settlers in Jamestown. Since then, the state’s special relationship with the horse has never waned. Virginia has been home to some of the most notable breeds in the wo... read more
Climate disruption is often discussed on a global scale, affording many a degree of detachment from what is happening in their own backyards. Yet the consequences of global warming are of an increasingly acute and serious nature.In Virginia Climate Fever, envi... read more
In Building Natures, Julia Daniel establishes the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created by these new professions in the ea... read more
A transatlantic phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "New Woman" broke away from many of the constraints of the Victorian era to enjoy a greater freedom of movement in the social, physical, and intellectual realms. As Alicia Car... read more
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has... read more
The smoke-laden fog of London is one of the most vivid elements in English literature, richly suggestive and blurring boundaries between nature and society in compelling ways. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor uses the many depictions of the Lond... read more
Norse mythology is obsessed with the idea of an onrushing and unstoppable apocalypse: Ragnarok, when the whole of creation will perish in fire, smoke, and darkness and the earth will no longer support the life it once nurtured. Most of the Old Norse texts that... read more
The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, fro... read more
Linked historically, culturally, and geographically, the counties that make up southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee are also connected by a shared decorative arts tradition. "Great Road Style," so called because of the region’s historical importanc... read more
The essays in this collection represent the type of research that has reshaped our understanding of early American architecture over the past thirty years. Carl R. Lounsbury, three-time winner of the prestigious Abbott Lowell Cummings Award offered by the Vern... read more
A leader in the fields of both regional architectural history and historic preservation, Catherine Bishir has collected essays covering three decades into one volume. Just as the subjects of her studies are at once regional and national, the essays included he... read more
The American landscape is host to numerous works of religious architecture, sometimes questionable in taste and large, if not titanic, in scale. In her lively study of satire and religious architecture, Margaret Grubiak challenges how we typically view such si... read more
J. B. Jackson transformed forever how Americans understand their landscape, a concept he defined as land shaped by human presence. In the first major biography of the greatest pioneer in landscape studies, Helen Horowitz shares with us a man who focused on wha... read more
Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the ea... read more
During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses buil... read more
The Appalachian mountain chain once contained the highest and most dramatic mountains on earth. Worn down over time, these mountains still hold some of the most diverse climactic zones and singular geological formations in existence. In East 40 Degrees: An Int... read more
Winner of the 2019 Award for Excellence from the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural HistoriansMuch of twentieth-century design was animated by the creative tension of its essential duality: is design an art or a science? In the postwar era, Amer... read more
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is one of the most important landscape architects of the twentieth century, yet despite her lasting influence, few outside the field know her name. Her work has been instrumental in the development of the late-twentieth-century design ... read more
Women have practiced as landscape architects for over a century, since the founding of the practice as a profession in the United States in the 1890s. They came to landscape architecture as gardeners, garden designers, horticulturalists, and fine artists. They... read more
Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls―these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postw... read more
Renowned for his extensive work in architectural history and historic preservation as an educator, scholar, activist, and public lecturer, Richard Longstreth is one of the most important architectural preservationists of the recent past. Looking beyond the Ico... read more
The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright are not immune to the social and environmental forces that affect all architecture. Because of the popular recognition and historical significance of his work, however, the stakes are unusually high when his buildings are mo... read more
Analogical thought is fundamental to creativity. The use of analogy can help to solve problems, make connections between disciplines, and use those relations to form original solutions. In Analogy and Design, Andrea Ponsi considers the role of analogical thoug... read more
San Francisco is a city designed for artists and wanderers. From North Beach, to Chinatown, to the cold, rough surf of Ocean Beach, to Marin, both visitors and lifelong residents have endless opportunities to explore new neighborhoods, buildings, environments,... read more
Many years have passed since architect Andrea Ponsi settled in Florence, and still he feels he does not fully comprehend this mysterious city. The way Florence eludes understanding, however, can be an opportunity--to keep seeking, to keep exploring. Ponsi’s Fl... read more
The Chesapeake region of eastern Virginia and Maryland offers a wealth of evidence for readers and researchers who want to discover what life was like in early America. In this eagerly anticipated volume, Camille Wells, one of the foremost experts on eighteent... read more
From Acadia and Great Smoky Mountains to Zion and Mount Rainier, millions of visitors tour America’s national parks. While park roads determine what most visitors see and how they see it, however, few pause to consider when, why, or how the roads they travel o... read more
Life outside our nation’s big cities comprises a remarkably rich aspect of America―culturally, historically, and physically. Because of the way we move through the country, however―on roads built for maximum expediency―most of us are rarely if ever exposed to ... read more
Unlike many United States industries, railroads are intrinsically linked to American soil and particular regions. Yet few Americans pay attention to rail lines, even though millions of them live in an economy and culture "waiting for the train." In Train Time:... read more
The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened w... read more
One of the singular talents in landscape design, Chip Sullivan has shared his expertise through a seemingly unusual medium that, at second glance, makes perfect sense--the comic strip. For years Sullivan entertained readers of Landscape Architecture Magazine w... read more
Famous for its transparency, the Philip Johnson Glass House--the icon of modernism that Vincent Scully called "the most conceptually important house of the century"--has nonetheless proven vexingly opaque to interpretation. Its architect, Philip Cortelyou John... read more
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Barbara C.
Aug, 2020
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Mar, 2020
