Navah Wolfe - Editor
New York, NY, USA
I'm a Hugo Award-winning editor, specializing in adult science fiction, fantasy and horror, and young adult and middle grade fiction.
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Overview
I'm a Hugo Award-winning editor with over twelve years of experience in the publishing industry, specializing in adult science fiction, fantasy and horror, and young adult and middle grade fiction. I spent six years as an editor at Saga Press, where I worked with writers such as Catherynne M. Valente, Rivers Solomon, Theodora Goss, Ursula Vernon, Elizabeth Bear, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and many more. Previously, I spent seven years as a children's book editor at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, where I worked with authors such as Tim Federle, Katherine Rundell, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Tony DiTerlizzi, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Jonathan Maberry, and more.
I love books with characters that steal your heart and stories that stay with you long after the last page is turned, fresh, innovative genre fiction, character-driven novels with a commercial hook, clever gorgeous books that get under your skin, and stories that make you question the status quo. Some of my favorite tropes include found families, slow burn romance, female friendships, capers and heists, locked room mysteries, non-European fantasies, new twists on a portal fantasy.
I love books with characters that steal your heart and stories that stay with you long after the last page is turned, fresh, innovative genre fiction, character-driven novels with a commercial hook, clever gorgeous books that get under your skin, and stories that make you question the status quo. Some of my favorite tropes include found families, slow burn romance, female friendships, capers and heists, locked room mysteries, non-European fantasies, new twists on a portal fantasy.
I love diving deep into a manuscript and working with the author to figure out how to make a book great. I want to be your partner in helping your book become the best book it can be, while staying true to your voice and your vision for it. Let's work together to help your manuscript shine!
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But you don't have to take my word for it! Here's what some of the writers I've worked with have said!
“Navah is a brave and insightful editor who isn’t afraid to take risks. She will make sure your book and you are on point. One of my most successful books literally would not exist without her, and she will always be an asset to any work.”--Catherynne M. Valente, author of the Hugo Award finalist SPACE OPERA
"Working with Navah is an absolute dream. She's equal parts fan and surgeon: generous with enthusiasm and praise but also unequivocal about cutting away what doesn't belong in the narrative and clarifying muddy storytelling. Her edit letters were freeing; I came to view them as checklists I could follow to the letter and feel confident they would improve my work. I owe so much of my success to her patient and incisive guidance."--Mishell Baker, Finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Tiptree and Mythopoeic awards for BORDERLINE
"Navah Wolfe is an exceptional editor. I worked with her on my first Young Adult novels and those books, the Rot & Ruin series, went on to win awards, go into development for film, and get adapted as a print comic and a Webtoon. None of that would have happened had it not been for her meticulous edits and developmental insights. She is the best of the best."--Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of V-WARS, ROT & RUIN, BLACK PANTHER, and GLIMPSE
"Navah Wolfe is the real deal. She's an editor with terrific range, capable of helping you crack a world or a punchline. Navah's patience, taste, and expertise make her an invaluable part of any editorial process—there's a high probability she's made some of your favorite books a whole lot better on their way to becoming books." --Tim Federle, author of New York Times Notable Book BETTER NATE THAN EVER
“Navah is quite simply the best editor I’ve had the pleasure of working with in my 14 years as a professional author.”--Matt Wallace, Hugo Award-winning writer
"Working with Navah feels like work to the extent that dancing feels like exercise. She delivers keen editorial insights with warm enthusiasm, asks all the right questions, and frames her perspective in ways that make you fall more deeply in love with your own book as you develop it. I couldn't make up a better editing partner in my dreams. The first short story of mine she worked on won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards, and was nominated for four other major awards;THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR was optioned for TV before it was even published and is now in its third hardcover printing. Correlation isn't causation, but friend, you want to correlate with this brilliant, ground-breaking editor. Navah Wolfe is passionate about good storytelling and she'll make your writing the best it can be."--Amal El-Mohtar, Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-winning author
"Navah's greatest gift is to look into the murky depths of the imperfect work and see its shining potential, a vision of what it *could be*, like seeing the pearl that a single grain of sand could become, or the sword-to-be in a grubby bucket of iron ore. She will kick your ass. She will make you work. And you will love every moment of it, and daydream about letting her do it again, and doodle her name surrounded by hearts and stars on spare bits of paper. I cannot imagine a more gifted, gracious, trustworthy, and empowering partner to have on the journey of book-fixing, and I'm a little bit jealous that you, dear reader, are in a position to consider hiring her. Do it."--Alexandra Rowland, author of A CONSPIRACY OF TRUTHS
Languages
English (US)
Fiction
Anthologies
Fantasy
Horror
Middle Grade
Science Fiction
Young Adult
Awards
- Hugo Award, Best Long Form Editor (2019)
- Shirley Jackson Award, Best Edited Anthology (Robots vs Fairies, 2018)
- Shirley Jackson Award, Best Edited Anthology (The Starlit Wood, 2016)
- Publishers Weekly Rising Star (2017)
Work experience
Senior Editor
Saga Press
October, 2013
–
October, 2019
(about 6 years)
As an editor at Saga Press (Simon & Schuster), I edited many award-winning and critically acclaimed books, including the USA Today bestselling Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente (Hugo Award finalist), The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss (Locus Award winner), This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. I also co-edited award-winning anthologies (with Dominik Parisien), including The Starlit Wood, Robots vs Fairies, and The Mythic Dream.
Associate Editor
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
April, 2007
–
October, 2013
(over 6 years)
At Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, I worked on many bestselling books, including some that won awards such as the Printz Honor, the Pura Belpré Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, the Stonewall Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Schneider Family Award.
Portfolio (18 selected works)
The Deep
Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes
The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society—and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award–nominated song “The Deep” from Daveed Diggs’s rap group clippingYetu holds the memories for her people—water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African s... read more
The Twisted Ones
T. Kingfisher
When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods in this chilling novel that reads like The Blair Witch Project meets The Andy Griffith Show.When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be? Answer: pretty bad. Grandm... read more
The Mythic Dream
John Chu, Leah Cypess, Indrapramit Das, Amal El-Mohtar, Jeffrey Ford, Sarah Gailey, Carlos Hernandez, Kat Howard, Stephen Graham Jones, T. Kingfisher, Ann Leckie, Carmen Maria Machado, Arkady Martine, Seanan McGuire, Naomi Novik, Rebecca Roanhorse, Alyssa Wong, J.Y. Yang
An all-new anthology of eighteen classic myth retellings featuring an all-star lineup of award-winning and critically acclaimed writers.Madeleine L’Engle once said, “When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.” The Mythic Dream gathers together eighteen stories that reclaim the myths that shaped our collective past, and use them to explore our present and future. From Hades and P... read more
Mary Jekyll and the Athena Club race to save Alice—and foil a plot to unseat the Queen, in the electrifying conclusion to the trilogy that began with the Nebula Award finalist and Locus Award winner The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter.Life’s always an adventure for the Athena Club...especially when one of their own has been kidnapped! After their thrilling European escapades rescuing ... read more
A Choir of Lies
Alexandra Rowland
A young storyteller must embrace his own skills—and the power of stories—to save a nation from economic ruin, in the standalone sequel to A Conspiracy of Truths. Three years ago, Ylfing watched his master-Chant tear a nation apart with nothing but the words on his tongue. Now Ylfing is all alone in a new realm, brokenhearted and grieving—but a Chant in his own right, employed as a translator t... read more
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.” So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that str... read more
Ancestral Night (White Space)
Elizabeth Bear
A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence—with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically... read more
Nest of the Monarch (A Dark Talents Novel)
Kay Kenyon
Kim Tavistock, undercover in Berlin as the wife of a British diplomat, uncovers a massive conspiracy that could change the course of the war—and she’s the only one in position to stop it in the electrifying conclusion to the Dark Talents series. November, 1936. Kim Tavistock is in Berlin on her first Continental mission for SIS, the British intelligence service. Her cover: a sham marriage to a... read more
A Conspiracy of Truths
Alexandra Rowland
A wrongfully imprisoned storyteller spins stories from his jail cell that just might have the power to save him—and take down his jailers too. Arrested on accusations of witchcraft and treason, Chant finds himself trapped in a cold, filthy jail cell in a foreign land. With only his advocate, the unhelpful and uninterested Consanza, he quickly finds himself cast as a bargaining chip in a brewin... read more
Mage Against the Machine
Shaun Barger
Harry Potter meets The Terminator in this action-packed adventure about a young man who discovers that everything he believed about his world is a lie.The year is 2120. The humans are dead. The mages have retreated from the world after a madman blew up civilization with weaponized magical technology. Safe within domes that protect them from the nuclear wasteland on the other side, the mages ha... read more
Mutiny at Vesta (2) (Shieldrunner Pirates)
R. E. Stearns
Adda and Iridian have survived the murderous AI that tried to kill them in Barbary Station...but now they'll need all of their ingenuity to escape the evil megacorporation that wants to own them, in this second space adventure in the Shieldrunner Pirates trilogy. Adda Karpe and Iridian Nassir have escaped the murderous AI that was trapping them on Barbary Station, and earned themselves a place... read more
In the sequel to the critically acclaimed The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Mary Jekyll and the rest of the daughters of literature’s mad scientists embark on a madcap adventure across Europe to rescue another monstrous girl and stop the Alchemical Society’s nefarious plans once and for all.Mary Jekyll’s life has been peaceful since she helped Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve t... read more
Space Opera
Catherynne M. Valente
2019 HUGO AWARD FINALIST, BEST NOVEL The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets the joy and glamour of Eurovision in bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente's science fiction spectacle, where sentient races compete for glory in a galactic musical contest…and the stakes are as high as the fate of planet Earth.A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire c... read more
Featured in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots A unique anthology of all-new stories that challenges authors to throw down the gauntlet in an epic genre battle and demands an answer to the age-old question: Who is more awesome—robots or fairies?Rampaging robots! Tricksy fairies! Facing off for the first time in an epic genre death match! People love pitting two awesome things against each... read more
Impostor Syndrome (3) (The Arcadia Project)
Mishell Baker
In the third book of the Nebula Award–nominated Arcadia Project series, which New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire called “exciting, inventive, and brilliantly plotted,” Millie Roper has to pull off two impossible heists—with the fate of the worlds in the balance.Three months ago, a rift between agents in London and Los Angeles tore the Arcadia Project apart. With both fey Courts s... read more
Now officially working for the Secret Intelligence Service, Kim Tavistock is back to solve another mystery—this time a serial killer with deep Nazi ties—in the sequel to At the Table of Wolves.Summer, 1936. In England, an assassin is loose. Someone is killing young people who possess Talents. As terror overtakes Britain, Kim Tavistock, now officially employed by England’s Secret Intelligence S... read more
An all-new anthology of cross-genre fairy tale retellings, featuring an all-star lineup of award-winning and critically acclaimed writers.Once upon a time. It’s how so many of our most beloved stories start. Fairy tales have dominated our cultural imagination for centuries. From the Brothers Grimm to the Countess d’Aulnoy, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Anderson, storytellers have cra... read more
Winter of Ice and Iron
Rachel Neumeier
In this gorgeous, dark fantasy in the spirit of Jacqueline Carey, a princess and a duke must protect the people of their nations when a terrible threat leaves everyone in danger.With the Mad King of Emmer in the north and the vicious King of Pohorir in the east, Kehara Raehema knows her country is in a vulnerable position. She never expected to give up everything she loves to save her people, ... read more
Navah has 1 review
Professionalism
Professionalism
Quality
Quality
Value
Value
Communication & Punctuality
Communication & Punctuality
Navah provided invaluable feedback, answered all of my questions, and finished everything ahead of schedule. I am thrilled that I got to work with her.
Myrna Foster, November 2019
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