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I grew up mostly in Mississippi, where I worked on my junior high and high school newspapers and yearbooks doing everything from writing copy and drawing illustrations
to choosing photos and laying out pages. After high school I attended Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, where I majored in Spanish and held a different editor position on the campus literary magazine each
year, including Assistant Editor. I also continued yearbook work, serving on the staff my first year and as the Editor the
following two years.
In 1999 I moved to the Atlanta area with my future husband and worked for three years in various customer service and secretarial positions. Early on I realized, however, that I genuinely
missed working on yearbooks--choosing photos, writing copy, and especially designing page layouts and editing the text. I
found myself editing everything that entered my line of sight: cereal boxes, menus, billboards, books I was reading.... I
also became the person colleagues came to for proofreading their writing. Thus, I realized that editing should be my future,
so in the summer of 2000 I began working as an occasional proofreader for August House Publishers in Little Rock, Arkansas, while holding down my day job.
Occasional editing was not nearly satisfying enough for me,
though, so in 2002, after much encouragement from my always-supportive husband, I enrolled at Georgia State University to obtain a master's degree in English. During my three years at GSU, I worked hard to improve my skills and broaden my experience
as an editor. I served two years as a writing tutor in the English Department's Writing Center, where tutors sit with students
one on one to provide personalized help in improving their writing and communication skills. I took an advanced grammar course
and an editing course and eventually began freelance editing for clients I connected with through the GSU English Department.
In the fall of 2003, in addition to the Writing Center and freelance work, I became the Associate Editor of the Eudora Welty Newsletter, published out of the GSU English Department by Welty scholar Dr. Pearl McHaney. From January to April 2004, I worked as an editorial intern with Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., a children's literature publishing house in Atlanta. In July 2004, I became the Editorial and Production Assistant (and eventually
Assistant Editor) for Studies in the Literary Imagination, a scholarly journal also published out of GSU. All three of these opportunities gave me editing experience, with Peachtree
Publishers also offering knowledge of a publishing house environment and the EWN and SLI also offering the opportunity to
design pages and learn page layout programs such as Adobe InDesign. I enjoyed these experiences so much, I would have stayed
in any of these three positions had I been able after graduation in May 2005.
After obtaining my master's degree,
I was hired as a full-time editorial assistant in the Special Publications Department of ASHRAE, a nonprofit membership society whose many services include publishing papers and books on heating, refrigerating, and air-conditioning
engineering. In the three short years I have been employed at ASHRAE, I have been promoted three times: to Assistant Editor
in July 2006, to Associate Editor in April 2007, and to Managing Editor in December 2008. My ASHRAE responsibilities allow
me to continue editing and designing page layouts and books and also give me the opportunity to improve my skills at editing
technical writing, which can sometimes be very challenging.
When not at ASHRAE, I continue to edit for both established
and new freelance clients. My freelance work has included editing diverse projects such as dissertations (on topics including
physical education teachers, teacher efficacy and job satisfaction, and segregation in schools and sports), research papers
and journal articles (on topics such as finance, physical education, youth gang members, and nonprofit organizations), resumes,
artist's statements, nonfiction and fiction short stories, novellas, plays, horror novels, a psychological thriller, a fantasy
novel, website text, promotional brochures, press releases, a collection of personal faith-based musings, children's picture
books and young adult novels for Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., a grief management/praise manuscript, a scholarly study of Christian
and pre-Christian writings, and a fictionalized but biographical novel about one couple dealing with the death of their young
son. I have also begun to expand my services to book design, having nearly completed a poetry book and having started work
on a collection of poems and short stories.
My other interests include taking photographs and participating in photography exhibits and attending meetings of the Atlanta-area photography clubs I belong to, watching
and reading about and discussing movies, attending local art openings and visiting museums, practicing Spanish in hopes that
I won't forget how to speak it, traveling with my husband when we can afford it, and reading fiction when time allows.
Often
I think that few people can relate to my obsessive-compulsive attention to detail (my intense desire to correct every comma
error I see in a magazine or while driving down the street, for example), but put simply: I enjoy editing. A manuscript arrives
in its newness, and the editor tweaks here and there, freshens up sections, and suggests possible ways to make this paragraph
flow more easily or that sentence read better.... The process is like helping complete a painting by framing it: the editor
doesn't take part in the artistic creation, only enhances the finished product.
Email me today to discover how my
love of editing will help put the finishing touches on your project.
Cindy Sheffield Michaels, June 2008
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Also feel free to read any of my examples, particularly The Ten Books Most Important to Me, as people's writing often reveals much about their personalities.
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