Evanston, IL—Award-winning author, performer, and educator Megan Stielstra has been appointed editor-at-large for Northwestern University Press.
Stielstra has been a mainstay in the Chicago arts, activism, and education communities. She is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, the 2017 Nonfiction Book of the Year from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Longreads, Guernica, LitHub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Steppenwolf Theatre, and regularly appears with the Paper Machete live news magazine at the Green Mill.
As editor-at-large, Stielstra joins the NUP acquisitions team to cultivate books with a Chicago/Midwest focus, as well as theater and performance and specialty trade titles that align with the press and university’s mission of publishing books of enduring scholarly and cultural value.
“Megan is an artistic force of nature,” Parneshia Jones, director of Northwestern University Press said. “Her trifecta talents as author, educator, and cultural worker align with the dynamic acquisitions team and our visions for NUP’s new publishing era.”
Stielstra’s acquisition vision is centered in the revered publishing history of Northwestern’s award-winning list. “I’m committed to voice-driven storytelling that centers the Midwest in all its complexities and am especially interested in literary writing across genres that taps into the heartbeat of Chicago. I want the weird and wonderful. I want to hold my breath ’til the end. I want work that wrestles with big questions, explores what’s missing from our current cultural and political dialogue, and shows us how deeply not alone we are in this beautiful mess of a world.”
Northwestern University Press Acquisitions Team
Faith Wilson Stein is the senior acquiring editor for scholarly publications. She holds a PhD in comparative literature. Before coming to Northwestern, she was an associate editor at Stanford University Press, where she supported the humanities list and acquired titles in literary studies and critical theory and managed The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche in translation.
Stein seeks titles in the humanities, including but not limited to philosophy, critical theory, literary studies and translations, performance studies, critical race and comparative ethnic studies, cultural studies, and film and media studies. She oversees the series Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Studies in Russian Literature and Theory (SRLT), Diaeresis, FlashPoints, Performance Works, Critical Insurgencies, Rethinking the Early Modern, and Superimpositions. She seeks authors with a distinct writing style and perspective and projects that do not simply contribute to but redefine the terms of ongoing conversations across disciplines.
Marisa Siegel is the senior acquiring editor for trade. The former editor-at-large for The Rumpus, Siegel holds an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is the author of the chapbook Fixed Stars (Burrow Press). Siegel oversees the Curbstone imprint, the TriQuarterly imprint’s fiction list, and trade acquisitions to the Press’s general list.
Siegel says, “I am passionate about writing that explores new possibilities through language, writing that opens doors and windows into new understanding, and writing that builds bridges across cultural divides. I want to publish fearless and gorgeously crafted books that help us understand both the lives of others and our own interior lives through story.”
Iván Pérez-Zayas is the NUP acquisitions coordinator and a former Mellon Diversity Fellow. A poet and comics studies scholar, he wrote his dissertation on South American graphic novels and holds a PhD from Northwestern University. His first poetry chapbook, Para restarse, was published in the summer of 2018 (Editorial Disonante).