About Us

Heidi Pitlor has been the series editor of the bestselling annual collection The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is also the editorial director of the literary studio, Plympton. Heidi was an acquiring and senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for ten years. She has worked with Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Cheryl Strayed, Colm Tóibín, Stephen King, Jesmyn Ward, Curtis Sittenfeld, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Kiley Reid, Tom Perrotta, Rainbow Rowell, Kate Atkinson, and many other writers. Heidi is also the author of the bestselling 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 has been interviewed by The New Yorker, The New York Times, National Public Radio, and many others. She lives outside Boston with her teenage twins and enjoys hiking with her rescue dog, doing the Sunday crossword puzzle, and writing too many to-do lists.

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 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.

Anna Solomon is an award-winning novelist who has been editing, coaching, and teaching writers for over fifteen years. Author of The Book of V., Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Little Bride, and co-editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, Anna’s books have been optioned for film, turned into librettos, and featured on media from NPR to Good Morning America. A two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, Anna’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Ploughshares, One Story, The Washington Post, Tablet, and elsewhere. She was born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts, teaches in Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and at Barnard College, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she enjoys watching scaffolding go up and down and taking long walks.

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 various books. 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.

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. 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.

Meg Whiteford is an editor and writer based in Manhattan with nearly ten years of experience in book editing. She is the editor at The Studio Museum in Harlem and editor-in-chief of the Museum's magazine, Studio. Most recent projects include Smokehouse Associates, Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, Losing Music, and Driving By Dead Reckoning. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, The Believer, BOMB, Garage, Liber, X-TRA, and more. She is the author of The Shapes We Make with Our Bodies (Plays Inverse, 2015) and Callbacks (Northwestern U. Press, 2018), winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Fiction Prize.

Marie Ungar studies English at Harvard University, where she's served as the poetry editor of The Harvard Advocate and has reported on the arts and more for The Harvard Crimson and Dig Boston. Her poetry can be found in Four Way Review, Palette Poetry, Lake Effect, and elsewhere. When she's not reading or writing, Marie enjoys going on walks with friends and arguing about all the pretty and ugly details of the buildings they pass.