Madeline Woda – Editor

I am a Columbia University-educated editor with experience at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Oxford University Press; the National Book Foundation; and others. After specializing in South Asian literature, I was the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Review for over two years. I have worked on books by Lydia Davis, Ben Lerner, and Jonathan Safran Foer. I have seen a book through every stage of development: from an agency, to the editorial process, to the marketing and publicity campaign. I now work at a mid-size publisher specializing in book club fiction and memoir.

While I am committed to assisting a client craft a perfect sentence, I believe that beautiful words mean nothing without innovative, organized ideas behind them. I focus first on developmental edits and then copy edits, working with an author to bolster their ideas before fixing their word choices. This technique applies to both fiction and nonfiction--I hold every story to the same level of clarity as a thesis chapter.

For authors looking to improve their queries: I have worked at three different literary agencies and currently hold a position at a top agency. I accept and reject hundreds of submissions per week and know what you need to do to stand out.