Meet the Acquisitions Team

The Acquisitions Department at Northwestern University Press maintains a wide and varied list covering multiple areas of scholarly and creative writing, from philosophy to poetry and from literature in translation to the theater arts, with myriad fields and genres in between. What holds the catalog together and guides the staff’s work is the collaborative energies they bring to each book. NUP’s acquisitions editors and coordinator all joined the press in recent years and are in constant dialogue about how every project they shepherd—from initial submission through peer review and onward toward publication—speaks to and builds from its deep history while advancing larger conversations with a vibrant and robust frontlist.

Faith Wilson Stein 

Faith is the senior acquisitions editor for scholarly titles, managing NUP’s numerous legacy and newly launched series, such as Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, FlashPoints, and Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image; she also oversees nonseries projects from across the humanities, including work in literary studies, theater and performance studies, and critical ethnic studies, as well as select translations and crossover titles. 

She is drawn to scholarship that interrogates our presumptions and pushes against received wisdom and established convention, both methodologically and stylistically. Faith is especially excited by books that speak to NUP’s rich backlist, including its many translations of now-classic world literature, and projects that work at the intersection of often disaggregated fields, such as critical theory from the Global South and film-philosophy. 

Faith joined NUP in 2021 from Stanford University Press, where she was an associate editor supporting SUP’s list in philosophy, literature, and religion. Having earned her PhD in comparative literature, with a focus in English, Russian, and French, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she started her publishing career at Slavic Review, first as an editorial assistant and then as managing editor of the journal. 

Marisa Siegel

Marisa is the senior acquisitions editor for trade titles, overseeing NUP’s acclaimed imprints Curbstone Books and TriQuarterly Books, as well as trade acquisitions to the press’s general list. Marisa acquires across genres, working with authors of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, drama, literature in translation, and researched nonfiction. 

She is drawn to craft-forward writing that explores new possibilities through language and opens doors and windows to new understanding. She is especially excited by work that challenges our expectations about genre and what makes a book “literary,” as well as projects that speak to NUP’s scholarly strengths from an artistic perspective; she is deeply invested in creating a home for writing from marginalized voices which does not seek to tokenize or exploit and in promoting transparency across the publishing industry.

Marisa joined NUP in 2021 from the award-winning literary magazine The Rumpus, where she was editor-in-chief and the owner. She holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and authored the chapbook Fixed Stars, published by Burrow Press in 2022.

Megan Stielstra 

Megan is the senior acquisitions editor for regional titles and acquires fiction, nonfiction, and genre-bending narrative work that centers the Midwest in all its complexities. She also oversees NUP’s renowned theater list of plays and practitioners’ texts. 
 
She is interested in what it means to write a place, specifically the lakes and prairies, asphalt and industry, and deeply unique people and histories that make up the greater Midwest, and has a special love for voice-driven storytelling that taps into the heartbeat of Chicago. Long before she began editing for the page, her craft sensibilities were honed in the development of performance work for stages and microphones. She values writing that respects and engages its audience and uses language as a bridge. 

Megan joined NUP in 2023 after working with the press on the reissue of her first two books, an experience that heightened her interest in preserving authors’ early works. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia College and is the author of three collections: The Wrong Way to Save Your Life (Harper Perennial, 2017), Once I Was Cool (NUP, 2021), and Everyone Remain Calm (NUP, 2021). She splits her time between Evanston, Illinois, where she serves on the faculty of Northwestern’s MFA in Prose and Poetry, and a cabin in rural Michigan, where she writes weird essays.

Iván Pérez 

Iván is the acquisitions coordinator, responsible for providing editorial support to each of the senior editors, as well as the press director, Parneshia Jones. In this role, he processes incoming submissions, prepares files for in-house and faculty board approval, transmits final manuscripts to production, and collaborates with the EDP and Sales and Marketing Departments at all stages of production and publication. 

Iván offers a crucial entry point into university publishing for junior scholars and early-career writers by training, supervising, and mentoring the press’s graduate student assistants and interns, thus providing a bridge between NUP and the wider Northwestern campus community. He is also committed to demystifying publishing for authors from underrepresented communities and at all stages of their careers by developing and acquiring original scholarly works in literary studies, theater and performance studies, and Latinx/Latin American studies, along with select trade projects, such as literary translations. 

Originally from San Juan, Iván moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern, where he earned his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese in 2022. He holds a BA in film and journalism from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where he also received his MA in English-language literature. A writer and comics studies scholar in his own right, Iván has been published by the Chicago Review of Books, Latin American Literature Today, and the peer-reviewed journal EU-topías; he was previously a journalist for Diálogo and was the coeditor of Un nuevo pulmón: Antología del porvenir (La secta de los perros, 2015), as well as author of the poetry chapbook Para restarse (Disonante, 2018).

To submit, please see our submission guidelines. 

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