Jack Livings – Editor

I’m a writer and editor with two decades of experience working with short story writers, novelists, and journalists. I studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth McCracken and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where I worked with Tobias Wolff. My short story collection, The Dog, won the PEN / Bingham Award for debut fiction in 2015. My fiction has also received two Pushcart prizes and the Rome Prize for Literature. My first novel, The Blizzard Party, published by FSG in early 2021, was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, and was long listed for the Cabell First Novelist Award.

As an editor, I’ve worked with writers who’ve gone on to win National Book Awards and Pulitzers. In recent years I've served as a developmental editor on fiction published by Houghton Mifflin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Ecco, among others. My editorial career started at The Paris Review, where I worked on short fiction and interviewed Salman Rushdie and Tobias Wolff for the Art of Fiction series. I’ve also worked as an editor at Newsweek and Time, Inc., where I trained and edited journalists for overseas editions of magazines including Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine.

Whether editing fiction, novelists or journalists, I strive to hone narrative, character, and language, and to elevate what Toni Morrison called the deep structure of a work--the essential nature of the story. Sometimes all your work needs is a second set of eyes; sometimes it needs a bone-deep edit. Regardless of how you want me to approach your manuscript, my goal is to help you make your story sing. I edit on your terms, according to what you want to accomplish.

*Please note: for scheduling reasons, I usually only take on manuscripts of at least 10,000 words. Short story writers are welcome to submit multiple stories or full collections.