About Alexandra

Editing and teaching

I have over 30 years of editing experience, including as deputy editorial director at Bridge Works Publishing. Since starting my editorial agency, Illuminated Manuscripts, in 1996, I’ve worked with novels, short story collections, memoirs, popular history, biographies, investigative journalism, as well as the occasional epic poem. I second Thomas Mann's observation that “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." In addition to hands-on editing, I endeavor to help authors slogging through an umpteenth draft remember what is most worthwhile and vital in their book.

I was in at the founding of Bridge Works, an independent literary publisher, and was responsible for choosing and editing some of that house's commercial and critical successes. Among these are the best-selling Patty Jane's House of Curl by Lorna Landvik; and National Jewish Book Award-winner The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. I also brought in Tom Perrotta's first book, Bad Haircut, Stories of the Seventies.

My editing is informed by teaching writing at Columbia, Yale, The New School, and Hungary's graduate journalism program at Eotvos Lorand University, as well as hosting an independent workshop of fiction writers which has been chugging along for over 25 years. To both clients and students, I provide user-friendly feedback with the aim of helping the author become his or her own best editor.

Academic background

It took me a long time to recover from the English Literature major at Yale and to recognize that iambic pentameter isn't always the way to go. I hold an MFA in fiction from the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, where I learned to use "workshop" as a verb. I’m a former Fulbright Scholar and recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction as well as several other obscure but respected awards for fiction and journalism.

In the world beyond the hard covers

I’ve given talks at AWP and events sponsored by Poets & Writers and the N.Y. State Council on the Arts; am a reader for the Center for Fiction’s first-novel prize; and a regular book reviewer for The East Hampton Star. I speak passable Hungarian and French, am a member of the Author’s Guild and the academic ACT-UAW union, and have lived in Brooklyn since before it was cool.