Karinya Funsett-Topping
Editor specializing in manuscript critique, developmental editing, and traditional publishing support for most categories of fiction and nonfiction.
Karinya Funsett has a wide-ranging professional background, including stints as a book reviewer, bookseller, arts desk writer for a newspaper, literary journal editor, and chief bedtime story reader for her two children. She joined The Editorial Department in Tucson in 2006 as the submissions director for our Agent Matchmaking Program. Since then, she’s grown passionate about working directly with writers in our development editing program and supporting authors who want to traditionally publish in finding the right literary agent.
Karinya’s editorial style is warm, relaxed, and thoughtful with respect to an author’s voice and vision. She brings a keen critical eye and offers specific, carefully reasoned feedback that affirms a writer’s strengths while gently challenging areas for growth. Her notes are detailed but never overwhelming—clear, nuanced, and often delivered with a touch of humor. She excels at identifying both structural and emotional through-lines in a manuscript and approaches every project with care, curiosity, and a collaborative spirit. Her goal is to make writers feel understood, supported, and inspired to take their work to the next level.
She especially enjoys working with authors of romance, women’s fiction, mainstream fiction, literary fiction, young adult fiction, short stories, and anything with a bit of magical realism. In nonfiction, she’s drawn to memoirs and essay collections.
Karinya graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Creative Writing (fiction and nonfiction) in 2005 and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction in 2008, both from the University of Arizona. She now works from Michigan, where she lives with her husband, two children, an orange cat, and far more books than she has shelf space for.
