Heidi Pitlor Editorial
Heidi Pitlor has worked in publishing for three decades. Since 2007, she has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories. She is also the editorial director of the literary studio, Plympton. She has worked with Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Min Jin Lee, Curtis Sittenfeld, Elizabeth Strout, Richard Russo, Anthony Doerr, B.A. Paris, Janelle Brown, Jeff VanderMeer, Catherine Steadman, and many others. She has been interviewed by The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, and many other outlets.
Heidi is the author of the novels The Birthdays, The Daylight Marriage, which was optioned for film, and Impersonation. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives outside Boston.
Heidi enjoys literary and commercial fiction, memoir, narrative non-fiction, and non-religious self-help. She has a soft spot for dark humor, surprise, irreverence, genre blending and busting, and well-developed characters.
For more than six years Nicole Lamy was the books editor of the Boston Globe, where she expanded books coverage with new weekly literary features, including a variety of page one stories and two columns that she wrote herself: 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 reviews, fiction, and long form journalism at the Harvard Review, Transition magazine, The American Prospect, and the Boston Book Review.
In addition to book reviews and features she has written about food, photography and parenting among other topics for the Globe, the Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, and the American Scholar. She has served on committees for both the Boston Book Festival’s One City, One Story project and The Associates of the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence program. Nicole lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, three children, and two dogs.
In addition to reading literary fiction and short stories, Nicole is interested in 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. She continues to keep up with children's books: picture books, middle grade fiction and non-fiction and young adult, too.
Christine Utz is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with over a decade of teaching and editing experience. 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 for nonfiction titles, including works by Dr. Christopher Emdin and a book about Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) by Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo. 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. When she isn't writing or editing, Christine loves to be outdoors hiking or working with animals, especially birds and horses.
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.
Amy Zhang is a writer, editor, and producer, passionate about storytelling across the page, stage, and screen. For two years, she was Hyphen Magazine's non-fiction editor, guiding emerging writers from idea to final essay. As a segment producer at Netflix's Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, she produced groundbreaking episodes on topics from Chinese feminists to Indian cricket scandals. Amy is a writing teacher at the Great Books Summer Program at Stanford and Beijing University, and was the Director of Non-Fiction at Amherst in 2021. Amy's writing can be found in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Catapult, Atlas Obscura, and Jellyfish Review, where her flash fiction was nominated for Best Small Fictions of 2020. Previously, she has held fellowships at VONA Voices and the Theoria Foundation, and is currently a Periplus writing fellow. In her free time, Amy can be found swimming, eating spicy food, or borrowing too many books from the library.
Amy is interested in literary and commercial fiction, and narrative non-fiction. She's drawn to inventive writing, stories centering marginalized people or the underestimated, and both cerebral and funny voices. She loves heartwarming and zany romantic comedies, coming-of-age stories, and memoirs that interrogate power structures and illuminate deeper meanings about belonging and community.
Willie Fitzgerald was a 2022-2023 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT – Austin and is a contributing editor at American Short Fiction. His short stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Joyland Magazine and elsewhere.
Willie is interested in literary and commercial fiction, short stories, historical fiction, and science writing that connects the personal and the world around us.
Sara Komatsu is a recent graduate from Harvard, where she studied English and Film Studies. In school, she served as an editor at The Harvard Crimson and co-directed the Harvard Ballet Company. She’s been working at Plympton and with Heidi for a few years now, and she loves being at the intersection of books and film/television. She’s previously worked in development at Skybound Entertainment and in marketing at the Vail Dance Festival.