Heidi Pitlor Editorial
Heidi Pitlor was the series editor of the annual bestselling anthology The Best American Short Stories for eighteen years. Before that, she was a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for ten years. She is the editorial director of Plympton, a literary studio who seeks to bridge literature and technology, and to find more readers for great writing. She has worked with Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Cheryl Strayed, Min Jin Lee, Andrew Sean Greer, Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Strout, Richard Russo, Lee Child, Anthony Doerr, B. A. Paris, Rainbow Rowell, Jesmyn Ward, Alix Harrow, Janelle Brown, Angie Kim, Curtis Sittenfeld, and many other writers.
Heidi is the author of the bestselling novels The Birthdays, a Book Sense Top 20 pick and a Border’s Original Voices selection; The Daylight Marriage, which was optioned for film, named an Indie Next pick, and featured as a "must read" by Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Coastal Living Magazine, Family Circle, The Advocate, and Health Magazine; and Impersonation, a Good Morning America Must Read, an Apple Books Best Book, and an Indie Next Great Read. The New York Times Book Review said of Impersonation, "Pitlor’s voice is witty and brisk...like sitting down with a refreshingly honest friend who skips the part about how great her life is and dives right into the real stuff. We need more friends like this. Authors, too."​
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Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, Ploughshares, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere.
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Heidi seeks fiction and nonfiction with voice, energy, surprise, humor, and wisdom. She love a good page-turner, memoirs about family and work, and any writing that takes her somewhere new.
Christine Utz has over a decade of teaching and editing experience. A graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she serves as Assistant Editor at the literary studio Plympton, where she has contributed to the editing and shepherding of fiction by many A-list writers. She has also ghostwritten nonfiction titles, including works by thought leaders in education, business, and psychology. Her fiction has appeared in Saw Palm, Turbine | Kapohau, MARY, Joyland, BorderSenses, and Flock. She's also a contributing author to Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America.
Christine is interested in environmental fiction and environmental narrative and reported nonfiction, speculative fiction, literary fiction, short stories, upmarket women's fiction, self-help, and ghostwriting.
When she isn't writing or editing, Christine loves to be outdoors hiking or working with animals, especially birds and horses. She lives in Minneapolis, MN with her husband, daughter, two cats, and five chickens.
Willie Fitzgerald is a senior editor at American Short Fiction. He was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT – Austin. His short stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Joyland Magazine, and elsewhere.
He is interested in literary fiction, especially short stories and short story collections, historical fiction, some memoir, and nonfiction projects that wed personal histories to illuminating topics in history, science, technology, and health. He would be excited to work on imaginative and character-driven SFF, and has a soft spot for a well-crafted spy thriller.
Willie lives in Brooklyn, and when he isn't reading or writing can be found spending too much money in specialty grocery stores.
In 2024, Nicole Lamy became the series editor of The Best American Short Stories. For more than six years, she was the books editor of the Boston Globe, where she also wrote a children’s book column called Short Stack and a reader advice column called Match Book, which she subsequently wrote for the New York Times Book Review. She has also edited for the Harvard Review, Transition magazine, The American Prospect, and the Boston Book Review.
In addition to literary fiction and short stories, Nicole is interested in picture books, middle grade fiction, young adult fiction, criticism, essays, and narrative non-fiction of all kinds—especially memoir, writing about travel, psychology, sociology, music, art, food, and politics. Despite being forced to memorize mediocre poetry in the sixth grade, she loves to read writing in verse and always follows poets when they wander down prose paths.
Nicole lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, three children, and two dogs.