Leslie Watkins

Leslie Watkins – Editor

I am best at structure, transitions, word usage, references, data presentation, and style. Humanities and law. I’d like to branch out.

Overview

In addition to copyediting multiple books, reports, and journal articles on academic subjects as well as legal issues related to North Carolina law (as an editor at the UNC School of Government-Chapel Hill (2008-2019) and as an assistant managing editor at Duke University Press (2000-2008)), I also helped edit and produce the following biographical reference works: The American National Biography (24 vols., Oxford University Press, 1999) and Black Women in American: An Historical Encyclopedia (2 vols., Carlson Publishing, Brooklyn, NY, 1992).

In a more popular vein, I have served as a reader-commenter-proofreader for Virginia Postrel, an LA-based author and public scholar, on both The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and her forthcoming book, The Fabric of Civilization: Textiles, Technology, Trade. In the acknowledgments to The Power of Glamour, Postrel described me as someone "who may very well be my ideal reader." I also read and commented on the final draft of Greg Lukianoff's book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate (Encounter Books, 2014). Lukianoff is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit that works to ensure free speech on college campuses. Both authors have been kind enough to let me use them as references.

Services
Non-Fiction
Christian Non-Fiction Education & Reference History Humanities & Social Sciences Law Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies
Languages
English (US)
Awards
  • Distinguished Award in Technical Publishing, North Carolina chapter, Society for Technical Communications (STC), 2001, for Motor Vehicle Law and the Law of Impaired Driving in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: UNC Institute of Government, 2000).
  • 2014 Margaret Taylor Writing Prize (author/editor collaboration) for State of North Carolina Extradition Manual, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: UNC School of Government, 2013).

Portfolio

Winner of the Dartmouth Medal for Outstanding Reference Publication of 1994, the first edition of Black Women in America broke ground - pulling together for the first time all of the research in this vast but underrepresented field to provide one of the strong... read more
In Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang explores how Asian Americans use music to construct narratives of self, race, class, and belonging in national and transnational spaces. She highlights how they navigate racialization in different genres by consideri... read more
For many, the death of a parent marks a low point in their personal lives. For Martin Duberman—a major historian and a founding figure in the history of gay and lesbian studies—the death of his mother was just the beginning of what became a twelve-year period ... read more
Developed in the United States in the 1980s, facial feminization surgery (FFS) is a set of bone and soft tissue reconstructive surgical procedures intended to feminize the faces of trans- women. While facial surgery was once considered auxiliary to genital sur... read more
In the spring of 1994, the tiny African nation of Rwanda was ripped apart by a genocide that left nearly a million dead. Neighbors attacked neighbors. Family members turned against their own. After the violence subsided, Rwanda's women—drawn by the necessity o... read more
For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America’s colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. Drawing on a decade of experience battling for freedom of speech on campus, First Amendment lawyer... read more
In provocative detail with more than one hundred illustrations, critically acclaimed author Virginia Postrel separates glamour from glitz, revealing what qualities make a person, an object, a setting, or an experience glamorous.What is it that creates that ple... read more

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