David McAninch – Editor

I've always believed the best editors have a visceral, firsthand sense of how hard the act of writing can be, and I know that my own experience as an author and feature writer — the teeth-grinding, the self-doubt, the pressure, the waiting! — has made me a more thoughtful, sensitive, and honest editor. I also know that all the work can be worth it. My 2017 culinary memoir, "Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place" (HarperCollins), was named one of 2017's Best Summer Travel Reads by the New York Times Book Review and was chosen by Town & Country as one of the Best Books of the Year. And those accolades did feel great. I've kept the writing side of my career going since then by contributing cover stories to the New York Times travel section, focusing primarily on France; my writing for the section was included in the Times' Best Travel Reads roundup in 2017 and was selected by Times editors for the anthology "Explorer: 100 Trips Around the World," published by Taschen in 2020. My earlier writing for the City section of the paper was anthologized in "More New York Stories" (NYU Press, 2010). I've also written for Departures, New York magazine, and Saveur, where I was an editor for nine years. As for my editing acumen, I've honed it most recently as the features editor at Chicago magazine, where I assigned and shepherded award-winning articles on a wide array of topics by nationally prominent journalists, essayists, humorists, and novelists, including Alex Kotlowitz, Camille Bordas, Kathleen Rooney, Rick Perlstein, Peter Sagal, Eve Ewing, Kim Brooks, and the Pulitzer-nominated novelist Rebecca Makkai, with whom I've collaborated on four major features. I've also helped bestselling authors like Mark Adams ("Turn Right at Macchu Pichu," "Meet Me in Atlantis," "Tip of the Iceberg," all from Dutton) hone their first-draft manuscripts, and have helped emerging memoirists like James Oseland ("Jimmy Neurosis," Ecco Press) bring their stories to life as a consultant during the writing process itself. I've also edited and co-written cookbooks and art books, and worked as a copywriter, editor, and content consultant for creative agencies and custom publishers. In everything I've done, I've tapped into an abiding passion for the written word and for putting those words together to create memorable, enduring stories that lots of people want to read.