My Credentials

Or, why it isn’t blind faith if you hire me

You should never hire an editor just because they say they’re good at editing. It’s keen to hire someone who is confident in what they do, but you need to build confidence in their abilities as well. So, here are my credentials—the reasons you need in order to lay a foundation of confidence in me as an editor and designer.

Soft Reasons

Heard of hard and soft skills? Never mind going to Google, I’ll give you the definitions here. To quote Washington State University, hard skills = “specific, teachable abilities or knowledge sets that are often acquired through formal education, training programs, or on-the-job experience,” while soft skills = “interpersonal attributes and personality traits that influence how effectively you interact with others and manage your work.”

Using this framework, I will give hard and soft reasons for hiring me. Let’s start with soft…

My entire life, I’ve had a natural aptitude for reading and writing. My command of the English language developed at a quicker pace than most. I even have an aptitude for picking up other languages, but if I don’t practice regularly, I lose grasp of them. Something I have never stopped practicing, however, is the English language.

Since middle school, I’ve written thousands of words of poetry per year. My “poetry 2024” document on Google Docs comprised over 7,000 words, my “poetry 2025” has nearly 9,500, and, as of August, my “poetry 2026” doc is at 3,500. I consider myself, first and foremost, to be a poet, and I hope to make good on my seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher’s statement that I’ll get the Pulitzer Prize one day.

Hard Reasons

But I won’t pretend that quantity = quality. So here are the hard reasons.

In my senior year of high school, I had a 4.05 weighted academic GPA, ranking 55 out of my 650-student class and 61 out of the entirety of grades 10-12. I entered UCSB as an English major but ultimately attained my BA in Film and Media Studies with a minor in English; I had a 3.79 GPA in my major and a 4.0 in my minor, and thus received outstanding achievement awards from both departments. Numbers and awards are good proof—but so is the fact that the services I’m now offering are skills I developed at university level.

The summer before my senior year at UCSB, I found out about The Catalyst Contemporary Literary Arts Magazine. The Catalyst, run by Professor Brian Donnelly for many years now, is a class in which students learn how to peer review poetry and prose, create visual art, and design magazine layouts for publication; throughout it all, they learn how to use the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, especially InDesign.

Only a handful of people—who aren’t the head editors and editor-in-chief selected the previous year—remain part of the Catalyst team for more than one quarter, and I was one of them. By the end of my senior year, my poetry and art was featured in and I helped design and edit layouts for three issues of the magazine, I honed my ability to provide constructive feedback, and I gained intermediate working knowledge of Adobe InDesign. But most importantly, I gained direction—without The Catalyst, I probably wouldn’t have pursued a career in publishing.

This brings us to my greatest credential: I have an MA in Publishing. After graduating from UCSB, I applied to publishing master’s programs across England (it’s cheaper to move to the UK than to attend a private university in the US) and entered the University of Exeter’s one-year, full-time, in-person program in the fall of 2023, supported by the merit-based Global Excellence Scholarship.

During my MA, I gained valuable editorial, design, and marketing knowledge and experience through lectures, workshops, and hands-on projects. On top of other classes and schoolwork, my cohort and I wrote, edited, designed, marketed, and published the 187-page book Publishing and Literary Networks in the South West (2024) from September to March. From September to June, I edited poetry part-time for ENIGMA Literary Journal. From March to August, I solely proposed, wrote, edited, designed, published, and distributed a 50-page local music zine called UNEARTH for the practical project portion of my dissertation, for which I received a first-class grade. Alongside my studies, I also freelanced: from May to August, I remotely copy-edited and designed the novel Nod by Sheldon Strickland.

My formal education made me a better writer, editor, and designer, and I was ultimately awarded an MA in Publishing with Distinction, which is the highest level of academic achievement in the UK.

If it’s worth anything more to you, other ‘hard’ credentials I have are a Mensa-provided IQ of 132 (though I believe timed IQ tests are severely flawed) and a minimum clerical typing speed of 54 WPM.

In Conclusion, I’m Qualified

So please consider me if you need anything—and I do mean anything, whether it’s a résumé, blog post, or novel—edited. Additionally, I love design work, from book cover spreads and colophons to brand logos and album covers.