Diana Pho – Editor

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I am an award-winning Hugo Award-nominated developmental editor, freelance writer, public speaker, and all-around nerd, bringing over a decade of Big Five traditional publishing expertise to the table. I'm a former editor at Tom Doherty Associates (for the imprints Tor Books, Tor Teen, Starscape & Tor com Publishing), where I acquired science fiction and fantasy novels, short fiction, and full-volume comics. I am currently Editorial Director at Erewhon Books.

I love the art of storytelling. I strongly believe that we are the tales we tell of ourselves, our communities, and our world. Making good stories is more than putting words together in interesting ways. It’s about solid communication, being open-minded, seeing ways to deepen an author’s creative vision, while also adding to their creative toolkit.

I have expertise in the whole range of speculative fiction, horror, young adult, and middle-grade stories. My comfort zone in editing is broad: from literary to commercial, flash fiction to door-stoppers, prose novels and graphic novels.

Please note that I do not edit the following: non-fiction, poetry, screenplays, or picture books.

My science fiction tastes include near-future, space adventure/ space opera, cyberpunk, hopepunk, afrofuturism, technothrillers, dystopia and climate science fiction. On the fantasy side, I enjoy historicals (with a particular eye for non-Western settings), steampunk, alternate history, dark fantasy, and contemporary fantasy. My horror tastes fall under the “small h” rather than “die-hard Horror”: literary with a twisted speculative touch, supernatural, occult, gothic, dark sci-fi, new weird, pulp with a modern twist. (Also, Bruce Campbell is a horror genre of his own — you can fight me on this!)

Books I’ve edited have won the Thriller Award (A.J. Hartley’s Steeplejack, for Best Young Adult), the Ditmar Award (Thoraiya Dyer’s Crossroads of Canopy, for Best Novel) , the American Library Association’s Alex Award (P. Djeli Clark’s The Black God’s Drums) and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year Selection (Marie Miranda Cruz's Everlasting Nora, for Middle Grade). Several of my books earned Junior Library Guild Selections, multiple starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, School Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, and Kirkus, and are finalists for the Nebula Award, Lambda Literary Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and Andre Norton Award for Young Adult.

I’m also a three-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor, Long-Form, one of the most prestigious honors in the field of speculative fiction.

I offer a range of editorial services, including

- Editorial Assessments

- Full Developmental and Line Edits

- Query Letter Critique (with optional 10-page line edit)

- Sensitivity Reading / Cultural Consultant

- Workshop & Speaking Engagements

For any project, I bring my wit, verve, and friendly collaborative energy to improve upon a unique story. I hope to be the stepping stone an aspiring author needs to take their fiction to the next level using a keen intellect, an empathetic heart, and a few funny GIFs along the way!