Jackson Howard on Risking It All
In Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics
Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?
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From the episode:
Merve Emre: One of the programs I’m especially proud of having set up at Wesleyan is a suite of fully-funded summer internships in media and publishing for our undergraduates. One of my brilliant students, Mia Foster, interned at Farrar, Straus and Giroux this summer, where she worked with the inimitable editor Jackson Howard. As a treat, I asked her to introduce him—here’s what she had to say:
Mia Foster: It’s often said that taste can’t be taught, but for our guest Jackson Howard, that was never a problem. Jackson is known for his impeccable vanguard taste in both fiction and nonfiction, a taste that has reshaped the publishing industry. Jackson has an uncanny knack for discovering exceptional talent. Under his guidance, books have won or been nominated for prestigious awards including the Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the LA Times Award for First Fiction to name just a few. But perhaps Jackson’s most culturally transformative work has been with queer authors.
Writers like Sarah Schulman and Judith Butler, whose work has changed the course of academic and political thought, have trusted Jackson with their most recent non-fiction. As an advocate, guide, and confidant, Jackson is helping usher in a new era of publishing, one that prioritizes voices long-marginalized. His authors adore him so much that one even shares a matching tattoo. A fierce defender of life beyond the office job, he maintains a balance that many in the industry admire, using his outside life to inform and inspire his editorial work.
For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Jackson Howard is an editor and writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn.
He’s Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprints MCD and AUWA (headed by Questlove), where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he has published include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Catherine Lacey, Bryan Washington, Laura van den Berg, Sarah Schulman, Jonathan Escoffery, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Imogen Binnie, Shon Faye, Henry Hoke, Thomas Grattan, Venita Blackburn, Missouri Williams, and many others. Books he has edited have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction.
A longtime Pitchfork contributor, his reviews, profiles, and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, W., i-D, office, Document, and elsewhere.
In 2023, he was featured in New York magazine’s Power Issue and was named one of Harper’s BAZAAR’s 36 Voices of Now and part of Town & Country’s Creative Aristocracy. In 2022, he was named a Star Watch Honoree by Publishers Weekly.
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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf
The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.
