Colleen Kinder-Murray – Editor

I'm the co-founder of the literary magazine Off Assignment, and I teach part-time at Yale Summer Session. I've edited various nonfiction manuscripts, including The Recovering (Leslie Jamison) and Hard to Love (Briallen Hopper), and provided critiques for individual chapters/essays in The Empathy Exams (Leslie Jamison), Make it Scream Make it Burn (Leslie Jamison), and The Cloudbuster Nine (Anne R. Keene).

I've taught at the Yale Summer Writers' Conference, The Gotham Writers' Workshop, The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop, The University Of Iowa, The Banff Literary Journalism Program, The Millay Colony, Semester-at-Sea, the Chautauqua Institute, and OSU's MFA Program at Cascades. I'm also the author of the guidebook Delaying the Real World (Running Press, 2005) and the co-editor of the anthology Confessions of a High School Word Nerd (Penguin, 2007). As editor of the forthcoming essay collection Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us (Algonquin, fall 2021), I worked with esteemed writers such as Peter Orner, Vanessa Hua, T Kira Madden, Pico Iyer, Faith Adiele, and Elizabeth Kolbert, to shape and polish their stories.

I love helping writers find their way through long projects, and giving them propulsive feedback that helps them reach the finish line. Morale matters to me it; it's an aspect of this creative journey I attend to. After all, I'm a writer myself. I've been there. Making a book cohere is--well, the hardest thing.