Sarah Lyn Rogers – Editor

Are you struggling with a complete or in-progress manuscript? Need a set of fresh eyes on your work?

As a writer myself, I know firsthand how vulnerable and delicate it is to entrust unfinished work to another person, and I will handle yours with deep consideration and care. I can meet your writing on its terms, determine what it means to say from what it currently says, and help make its form and function legible to agents and acquiring editors.

I've worked in editorial at an indie publishing house since 2019 and have a decade of experience editing short fiction and essays for literary magazines. Short works I've edited have been anthologized, featured as picks of the week on websites and podcasts, and won the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Books I've acquired and edited have been glowingly covered in the New York Times, NPR, TODAY, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lambda Literary, Esquire, and the Wall Street Journal, and have won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir and the American Book Award.

At The Rumpus, where I edited fiction for four years, I was known for championing debut voices. In my years at Soft Skull Press, I have acquired and edited an eclectic list spanning literary fiction, memoir, and poetry. My authors tell me they have felt seen, understood, and cared for throughout the entire publishing process.

If you need help structuring your memoir, line-editing and reordering your poetry collection, or deciding how to end your novel, let's talk!

Testimonials:

"Sarah is one of the most attentive, insightful, and gifted editors I have had the privilege of working with in my career. With any writing project, she has the rare ability to see both the big picture and the smallest details. At Soft Skull, she shepherded my second poetry collection What to Miss When from concept to complete manuscript to launch. I trust Sarah's judgment and taste completely and can't wait for my next opportunity to work with her!" —Leigh Stein, author of the poetry collection What to Miss When and the novel Self Care

"To work with Sarah is to have the extraordinary experience of working with someone who sees your work and illuminates it for you, showing you strands, details, themes, and connections you didn’t notice yourself. She deeply understood my manuscript and what I was trying to do—often better than I did. Her gentle, insightful comments and suggestions led me not only to a better understanding of my manuscript but to discover how I could make it work better on the page. Over the years, I’d drafted so many endings for my memoir that I lost count, and none felt right. Sarah helped me find my way to an ending of which I’m really proud. She also helped me to move through passages I desperately needed to write but had been afraid to start, with her wise, empathetic guidance." —Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage