Taylor Plimpton – Editor

My name is Taylor, and I’m an author, editor, and writing teacher who’s worked for more than 30 years in the magazine and book worlds. As an editor at Men’s Journal, Manhattan, Beach, and Love, Dog, I’ve had the honor of editing the work of highly esteemed and bestselling authors, including James Salter, Jenna Blum, Rick Bass, and Bethany Ball. In the book world, I’ve been lead editor on an array of manuscripts, including an anthology entitled, The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays, which USA Today called “A wonderfully irreverent look at the holidays.” More recently, I’ve focused my book editing on the self-help genre, including a modern study of Buddhist mindfulness and a guide to Tarot reading. A sincere practitioner of Zen Buddhism and Tai Chi, I’ve devoted much of my own writing to the spiritual/self-improvement side of things, as well, and two of my contributions to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review were later named “Notable Essays” in the Best American Essays series. But the truth is, in my long career in publishing, I have edited multiple genres—from memoir to literary fiction, from anthologies to cookbooks—and I feel at ease helping to make writers’ work better, no matter the category.

My own editorial strengths range from great attention to detail on a sentence level, to the more macro perspective needed to put together a book. I have the sharp eyes of a copy editor, quick to catch errors small and large, and I have a real ear for language—for anything that doesn’t sound right, or that doesn’t quite have the right rhythm and flow. It is at this level that my skills are at their finest—in my own work, and in others’, I am deeply committed to the perfection of every sentence, and every word. Any project that I edit will end up clean, smooth, and beautiful.

At the same time, one of my greatest editorial assets is a certain light touch: I refuse to put my personal stamp on someone else’s writing, seeking instead to guide writers to their own best work—nurturing their own voice, asking the right questions of them, providing the right encouragement. This sensitivity to writers' needs is due, in part, to my long tenure as a writer myself: my work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Town & Country, The New Yorker, and A Public Space, and I am the author of a memoir, Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark, which the Los Angeles Times called "...a rhapsodic book: light and free, the model for the memoir of the future..." My empathy for writers also comes from my years of experience teaching them—most recently as an instructor at Catapult, where I offered a workshop exploring the borders of fiction and nonfiction, and formerly as a professor at the Writer’s Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, where I lectured, led workshops, and offered seminars on Zen in the Art of Writing.

I look forward to working with you!