Bio

Erin Wilcox is a writer and editor of ten years’ experience with a background in journalistic, scholarly, and creative writing. Since 2004, she has worked mostly with fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Between her three-year stint as copyeditor for Alaska Quarterly Review and her current position as assistant nonfiction editor of Drunken Boat: An Online Journal for the Arts, she has edited some of the most talented literary writers of our day, including Grace Paley, Abigail Thomas, Marie Sheppard Williams, and Dorianne Laux. Yet she has always kept one foot solidly planted in speculative fiction, her first love.

As an editor, Erin’s philosophy is to embrace the writer’s creative vision, no matter where a piece is in the creative process. When it comes to line editing and copyediting, she is a talented ventriloquist, but increasingly she feels called to guide authors through the thicket of revision as a developmental editor and manuscript consultant. A full-time freelancer, she has worked with a wide range of publishers including Random House, Privateer Press, Kore Press, F & W, and Wheatmark. Most recently, pieces she developed have been published in Guernica, Residential Aliens, Wilderness House Literary Review, kidsthesedays.org, and Short-Story Me!: Best Genre Stories.

Erin’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been featured or are forthcoming in Praxis: Gender and Cultural Critiques, Soundzine, Stoneboat, Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska (University of Alaska Press), Veil: Journal of Darker Musings (Subsynchronous Press), and in radio broadcasts including KXCI Tucson’s A Poet’s Moment, Broad Perspectives, and Alaska Public Radio’s AK Radio. She writes for various magazines including Copyediting and TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

In Her Own Words

My primary focus at this point is helping writers of fiction and creative nonfiction develop and package their projects. I take on primarily writers of mainstream/literary fiction, women’s fiction, speculative fiction, and creative nonfiction, providing close attention and consultation regarding all aspects of writing, from manuscript revision to pitchcraft. I have come to enjoy working with authors as much as I enjoy working with stories, which I consider separate entities with minds of their own. I strive to walk the line between honesty and encouragement, advocating on behalf of the manuscript and also respecting the author’s vision for his creative work.

Writing of any genre can be great if it delivers the reader what it promises. The genres I am most passionate about are literary fiction and speculative fiction. Above all, I am predisposed to help writers of slipstream, character-driven science fiction and fantasy of any subgenre, and literary genres with a hint of the supernatural, such as magic realism and Southern gothic. I love literature for its devotion to language as art, fantasy for its mythic roots, science fiction for its expansiveness, and horror for its ability to render the darkest corners of our psyche in concrete forms. My favorite fiction writers include Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen King, Anne Rice, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Ursula LeGuinn, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, and JRR Tolkien. In nonfiction, I admire Annie Dillard, John Berger, Richard Rodriguez, and Joan Didion. Favorite poets include Robert Hass, Eavan Boland, Adrienne Rich, and Federico García Lorca.

Preferred Genres

Absolute favorite fiction genre: science fiction/fantasy

Preferred fiction genres: fantasy, horror, magic realism, science fiction, literary fiction

Other fiction genres Erin enjoys working on: western/frontier, satire, multi-cultural, women's fiction, gay/lesbian fiction, mainstream fiction

Fiction genres Erin prefers not to work on: romance, children's, Christian/inspirational

Absolute favorite nonfiction category: memoir

Other areas of interest in nonfiction: creative nonfiction, autobiography, memoir, gay & lesbian, health, mind, & body, new age, outdoors & nature, women's studies

Submissions

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