The Future of Publishing

In Lookout‘s blog series The Future of Publishing, we spotlight alums of UNCW’s publishing program, including former practicum members, who have gone on to careers in the industry. We continue our series with a profile of Morissa Young (MFA ‘24), a former Lookout staffer who also received the program’s certificate in publishing.  

As an editor at Milkweed Editions, Morissa handles the production of nearly two-thirds of the books on Milkweed’s list. She manages around fifteen to twenty manuscripts at a time, ensuring the projects stay on schedule at each stage of the publishing process, planning designs, assigning copyeditors, and taking care of large-scale developmental edits and more complicated copyedits. She is currently working with books that will be published as far out as spring 2027, including books for Multiverse, a series of writing by “neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled writers,” curated by poet Chris Martin. One of Morissa’s first books in this series, blush / river / fox by Anna Nygren, came out in February. She says that much of what she learned from her class on translation with Malena Mörling at UNCW directly informed her copyediting work on the book: “It’s kind of existing in a space between English and Swedish. There are words that are not quite Swedish, not quite English. It’s so inventive.”  

Morissa came to UNCW with the goal of entering the publishing industry.  

“I tried getting a bunch of different publishing jobs and couldn’t land one because of the whole ‘you don’t have experience’ thing,” she says. “I knew that I was good at this, but I just needed people to take a chance on me. So, I began my plotting, which involved going to grad school.”  

She had previously worked as an editor, proofreader, and intern with entities such as Dzanc Books, McIntosh and Otis, and Kinzer Projects. At UNCW, she tailored her classwork and her extracurriculars toward her goal of becoming an editor, working with Lookout Books and designing spreads for its sister literary magazine Ecotone as a graduate teaching assistant in the Publishing Laboratory. “I hardcore manifested this job for seven years,” she says, “With Lookout, I told Emily Smith what my goals were because I knew that I wanted to work in editorial, so I was able to really curate my experience there to suit my goals pretty perfectly. I talked a lot about it in my interview.”  

In addition to her role at Milkweed, Morissa, along with fellow Pub Lab alum Maggie Boyd Hare, founded literary magazine Strange Hymnal. The journal—which, as its name suggests, actively seeks out the strange—received over a thousand submissions in its first year and launched its first issue in spring of 2025.  

“Working in the Pub Lab highlighted how much I love the tactile experience of bookmaking, but we didn’t really have the budget to form a print magazine. So, we wanted to make Strange Hymnal something that is digital on purpose. We don’t want it to look like it should be a print mag. We want it to be a fully online space, yet with a lot of handmade elements.”  

This has certainly paid off, as Strange Hymnal was recently nominated for Beautiful Design in Chill Subs’ Annual Best Lit Mag Awards. “We get so many people saying, like, ‘this is exactly the type of thing I was looking for.’  It’s so special that it’s resonating with so many people.”  

Morissa had one main piece of advice for people looking to get into the publishing industry: make your own opportunities. Whether that’s sending cold emails, reaching out to lit mags, or interning with a letterpress, you have to be willing to make opportunities happen. She adds that you have to really be passionate about publishing: “It’s way too competitive and doesn’t pay well enough for you to decide to pursue it if you don’t actually love it.”   

Thank you to Lookout staffer Jessica Jones for her contributions to this profile. 

In our series The Future of Publishing, we reintroduce alumni of UNCW’s publishing programs, including former Lookout practicum members, who have gone on to careers in the industry. We continue our series with a profile of BFA certificate in publishing alumna Lauran Jones. 

An acquisitions editorial assistant at Bloomsbury, Lauran works in academic publishing, focusing on philosophy and classics. The first thing she does when she steps in the office each morning is check her email, an essential task to stay on top of her wide-reaching schedule. “I’m still learning the ropes,” she says. “There’s a lot of training involved, especially since Rowman & Littlefield, where I started in 2024, was acquired by Bloomsbury.” 

A major part of Lauran’s job is preparing accepted manuscripts for production. That means ensuring all permissions are cleared—especially for epigraphs or work previously published in journals—resolving lingering comments or highlights in the text, and polishing final details before handing it off to production. On a good week, she can get through about three manuscripts. 

Lauran’s workload includes everything from writing marketing copy and soliciting endorsements from scholars to drafting Library of Congress forms. “Acquisitions folks do more of the paperwork now,” she explains, “so I’ve had to learn a lot of new skills quickly.” 

About 20 percent of Lauran’s time is spent acquiring new titles. The rest she devotes to project management and author communication, providing vital support during each stage of the publishing process. During “commissioning week,” she reaches out to current authors to see if they have more ideas in the pipeline. She also keeps an eye out for standout articles in journals like Analytic Philosophy, and she reviews the unsolicited proposals that land in her inbox. 

Lauran then forwards proposals to the acquisitions editor. If a proposal advances, Lauran helps secure peer reviewers with relevant expertise, including scholars “with a wide range of perspectives,” she says, “especially voices that aren’t always centered in academia.” Diversity matters deeply to her. 

Publishing has been Lauran’s dream since she joined her high school’s literary club. “I fell in love with it on day one,” she says. As a student at UNCW, she went on to found SeaBreeze: A Literary Diaspora through Upperman African American Cultural Center and served as the youngest editor in the history of the student-run literary magazine Atlantis.

“I’ve always loved to read,” she says, “but I didn’t always see people who looked like me, or loved like me, on the page. That’s what pulled me into publishing. I want to help change that.” 

Lauran joined the Lookout Books publishing practicum in her last semester, as the press was finalizing its forthcoming anthology Bigger Than Bravery, edited by the late Valerie Boyd. “Working on Bigger Than Bravery showed me how beautiful and necessary these voices are. We were equals, and as the only Black person on the team, I really felt seen.” She contributed to the marketing campaign and cover design, and even curated the book’s playlist.

“Lookout taught me how publishing works from pitch to publication,” she says. “It gave me confidence that I could go wherever the job took me.”  

Beyond Lookout, she credits courses including Introduction to Book Publishing, Bookbuilding, and Sayantani Dasgupta’s Diversity in Publishing class as providing a strong foundation, especially when it came to understanding the lifecycle of a book. “Sayantani’s class really opened my world view,” Lauran notes. 

After completing her BFA, Lauran went on to earn a Master of Publishing from George Washington University, then spent a year and a half coaching swim lessons before landing her first full-time publishing job. “It takes a while,” she says. “Don’t get discouraged if you don’t land something right out of college,” she advises job seekers. She found her position at Bloomsbury through GW’s newsletter and says she got the job by being herself in the interview. “My now-boss could tell I was passionate and genuine.” 

After a four-year break, Lauran started writing again in late 2024. “It’s easy to get discouraged, but I’ve learned that even a sentence counts. You just have to pick the pen back up.” To emerging writers, she offers this practical encouragement: “Make a graveyard file. Kill your darlings, but know they’re not gone forever. And trust your editor! It’s okay to take a second to process all the red ink, but remember: they’re trying to help you get your work out into the world.” 

Currently, Lauran is excited about two things: The novel she’s writing (“Teaser—it’s about mermaids!”) and a series of titles she shepherded through production, including favorites Critical Mixed Race Philosophy, Why Suicide is Amoral, and Feminist Pragmatism and Social Rights. “All three authors are incredible women,” she says, “and the work they’re doing is so important. There’s a lot of room for diversity in philosophy, and I’m happy to be a part of that shift.” She’s also set a goal for herself: to publish her own book by the time she turns thirty. But she knows she’s already on a path of impact. “It takes a village to raise a child, and teachers are a part of that village,” she says. “I wouldn’t be where I am without them.” 

Working as both an agent and a publicist affords Zoe the opportunity to contribute to opposite ends of a book’s life cycle. As an agent, she’s usually the author’s first reader and advocate in the publishing process, and in publicity, she helps build media attention leading up to a book’s publication day. To manage her two roles, Zoe keeps both of her inboxes open and toggles attention to the author or book with most momentum at any given time.

As a publicist, Zoe’s daily schedule is never the same. Every day brings its own project, but on the best days, she collaborates with women on both her agency and publicity teams, peppering the chat with questions, aggravations, and solutions to keep their outreach fresh and media contacts relevant. Zoe works closely with fellow UNCW alumna and Pine State Publicity founder, Cassie Mannes Murray. This spring, she’s working on Amie Souza Reilly’s Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays, as well as Keetje Kuipers’s Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (Watch for it in April 2025, if you’re a Brandi Carlile fan.) and Catherine Weiss’ Big Money P*rn* Mommy (forthcoming in March, for fans of “spicy” fiction who might be curious about how it impacts your dopamine receptors).

Zoe set out to build a list of books that center underrepresented regions in literature, often bringing into the conversation authors with Southern, midwestern, and southwestern perspectives.

At Howland Literary, a boutique agency run by five women, Zoe works alongside her team to curate a diverse list defined as much by genre and audience as by identity and geographic setting. She set out to build a list of books that center underrepresented regions in literature, often bringing into the conversation authors with Southern, midwestern, and southwestern perspectives. Recently, Zoe and Howland Literary President Carrie Howland co-represented Sara Maurer’s debut novel, A Good Animal, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in winter 2026, and Zoe’s first novel sale, Fireweed by Lauren Haddad, forthcoming in April from Astra House.

“As much as publishing can be about who you know, there is also magic,” Zoe says, “in the fact that every book person is just a person with their own unique network. When we can become the joint that connects two webs, we double who we know—collaboration further connects us. That’s how we move books.”

. . . every book person is just a person with their own unique network. When we can become the joint that connects two webs, we double who we know—collaboration further connects us. That’s how we move books.

This focus on collaboration is a hallmark of Lookout’s approach to publishing too. During Zoe’s senior year at UNCW, she enrolled in the Publishing Practicum with Emily Smith and took Sayantani Dasgupta’s Diversity in Publishing course, both of which helped her build a panoply of skills as well as her mission-driven approach to publishing. Zoe has adopted Lookout’s objective to offer a haven for books that matter in her ongoing work with both Pine State Publicity and Howland Literary.

In our series The Future of Publishing, we reintroduce alumni of UNCW’s publishing program, including former Ecotone and Lookout staffers, who have gone on to careers in the industry. We continue our series with a profile of Southern Humanities Review’s Caitlin Rae Taylor.

As the editor of Southern Humanities Review, a literary quarterly published by Auburn University’s Department of English, Caitlin Rae Taylor does a little bit of everything, from reading submissions and creating production schedules to managing author contracts and designing covers. “If you can think of a task for working on a literary magazine,” she says, “I probably do it.”

Taylor developed these skills as a student in the MFA program at UNCW, where she was the fiction editor for Ecotone and the graduate publishing assistant for Lookout Books. Both Ecotone and Lookout are teaching entities housed in the Department of Creative Writing’s Publishing Laboratory, which aims to provide students with a foundation in editing and publishing. Many students arrive at UNCW feeling like Taylor did: “Being an editor was so far-fetched to me when I was in high school and college, and there were no classes at my undergraduate institution that had anything to do with publishing,” she recalls. “I of course had this amorphous dream about moving to NYC and publishing books, but I had no true path to get there.” But then she enrolled in the Ecotone practicum. This class was her first glimpse into the mystifying world of publishing, and she says it “unlocked everything.”

“Ecotone taught me how to compile a book as an art object, how the pieces in an anthology relate to one another, how they relate to the visual and document design. Lookout taught me how to technically master these kinds of designs, how to market a book, how to structure a production schedule, how to write marketing copy.”

In our newest series, The Future of Publishing, we’re reintroducing alumni of UNCW’s publishing program, including former Ecotone and Lookout staffers, who have gone on to careers in the industry. We continue our series with a profile of W.W. Norton’s Nicola DeRobertis-Theye.

Fiction editor of Ecotone while in the MFA program at UNCW, Nicola DeRobertis-Theye currently serves as the subsidiary rights manager for W.W. Norton and formerly worked as a foreign rights agent for Trident Media Group.

“On the foreign side, which is most of what I handle at Norton, we’re trying to place the translation rights to our books with foreign publishers,” she says. “It is a match-making process, knowing editors’ and houses’ tastes, and who can do well with what kind of book.”

“I’ve had really gleeful meetings at the book fairs in Frankfurt and London, where you get to celebrate in person this thing that has crossed borders and found readers,” she says. “It’s a similar process with the other rights, but knowing the book, knowing the ecosystem, that’s what it comes down to, and I do find that it takes both imagination and knowledge.”

In our newest series, The Future of Publishing, we’re excited to reintroduce alumni of UNCW’s publishing program, including former Ecotone and Lookout staffers, who have gone on to careers in the industry. To help celebrate the launch of Lookout’s redesigned website, we begin with a profile of Hub City’s Meg Reid.

Lookout Books is more than a haven for books that matter; it’s a teaching press under the auspices of the Publishing Laboratory at UNCW, making it also a haven for apprentice editors and publishers. The imprint and its sister magazine, Ecotone, offer students hands-on opportunities to gain experience in editing, marketing, publicity, design, and everything in between. Meg Reid, Director of Hub City Press in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was among the first class of students to support the work of the newly founded imprint.

The Lookout publishing practicum, taught by publisher Emily Smith, “completely prepared her for working for a small press,” Reid says, “which involves balancing a lot of plates and wearing a lot of hats.” While working for the press, she drafted grants, planned author readings and book tours, and wrote design briefs for artists.

“I always liked that we were called on to talk about the books in public often. I learned how to summarize a book, while communicating its important themes and resonances—a skill I use often now, pitching reps and booksellers,” Reid notes.

As part of her graduate work in writing and publishing, Reid enrolled in the Lookout practicum class multiple semesters and helped publish three titles: Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, Steve Almond’s God Bless America, and John Rybicki’s When All the World Is Old. She found it exhilarating to help build the imprint. “Edith’s book was a strike of lightning—we were brand new and suddenly in a national spotlight. I still regularly gift people Binocular Vision—to my mind, it’s the gold standard of short story collections.”

As director of Hub City Press, where she has worked since 2013, Reid now publishes between five to seven books a year in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She oversees the publishing program and helps realize Hub City’s mission to find and advocate for extraordinary voices from the American south.

“I always liked that we were called on to talk about the books in public often. I learned how to summarize a book, while communicating its important themes and resonances—a skill I use often now, pitching reps and booksellers,” Reid notes.