You began your career as a magazine editor, but what did it take for you to get there?

I went to graduate school and got a creative writing master's degree from Columbia University. My very first job out of that was at a literary magazine so I became an editor that way. There is a specific reason I ended up working at a literary magazine. I was in a seminar at Columbia and there was an older woman in our class. She had published a short story in The New Yorker, she was married to a psychiatrist and she had a child. Essentially, she was very grown-up. One day, towards the end of our time in the class, she came up to me and said, "You need to get a job in the industry. You need to go get a job at a literary magazine." I'll never forget her kindness. After that, I went to the library, read a bunch of literary magazines, decided which one I liked the best and applied for a job opening they had. I assumed what that older classmate was saying came from regret on her part for not participating in the literary life beyond just the solitary act of writing. So I took her advice and ended up at a small literary magazine.

How were you able to land an editorial position at Vogue magazine?

The fact that I had small pieces published during my time as a literary editor was very helpful in getting that job. It was a small magazine with an outsized influence so people would approach me to ask if I wanted to write for them. I ended up writing a few clips and those published pieces helped me when I applied to work at Vogue. I had written about a very famous photographer that Anna Wintour worked with—Richard Avedon—and she asked me about that piece and why I had said what I'd said. I wasn't a fashion editor, I was in the features department. I didn't understand a thing about fashion. If you watch "The Devil Wears Prada," which was in the same era, I was absolutely as clueless as that movie's protagonist when it came to fashion. But I did learn.

Why did you switch from magazine editing to book editing?

I was at a women's magazine that doesn't exist anymore. The leadership there was all women, and they were really smart. I had never quite been in an atmosphere like that, and it was great. But everywhere I went—and I worked at a bunch of magazines—I covered books. I worked at Harper's Magazine right after Vogue, and I started Harper's book review section, which still exists to this day. I always was concerned with whatever new books were being published. And covering new books was always a job that was given to me at every magazine I worked at because that was my heart's desire: to cover books. This just sort of became known, from the work I did at these magazines, that I was interested in uplifting authors and literature. Then one day I got a cold call from a publishing house asking me if I would like to be a book editor. And I pretty much got up and left my magazine desk right then. It was a dream come true.

What advice do you have for students wanting to enter the literary world?

The advice that woman gave me at Columbia is still excellent: get your foot in the door any way that you can. Open your mind to other paths than being an editor. There are lots of organizations that support reading and writing, and you should know what they are. You should become a citizen of those organizations. Philadelphia is a thriving city. Find the literary culture in Philadelphia and become a part of it. 

When it comes to landing jobs in the literary world it is helpful to know people. You should know what is going on in the literary world so you can move forward in the industry. If you want to get elected, so to speak, into the land of writing, you have to be a citizen of that land. Most importantly, you need to know how to write. Writing skills can keep you alive. It's a practice, it's a craft, it's something you have to keep up. If you think of other careers, like baseball or ballet, or even medicine or law, you have to keep up your skillset and practice all the time. You have to be good at it.