Masie Cochran, University of Arkansas alum and Editorial Director at Tin House Books presented "Tell Me a Story – Many Paths to Book Publication" at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 10, at The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Science. The Pryor Center Presents lecture series is part of the Pryor Center's expanded mission of education, research, and outreach.
Cochran's talk offers a behind-the-scenes look into the world of publishing—first drafts, finding an agent, acquisitions, editing, book covers, reviews, sales and awards. Cochran joined Tin House eleven years ago after previously working at Inkwell Management, a literary agency in New York City. She has worked in a variety of genres: memoir, literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, and short story and essay collections.
Cochran has edited many award-winning and bestselling titles, including the intricately plotted novels of Claire Fuller; an Obama Best Book of the Year pick (Cory Taylor's Dying: A Memoir); E. J. Koh's family saga The Magical Language of Others; Annie Hartnett's darkly funny Rabbit Cake; Rosalie Knecht's genre-bending Vera Kelly detective series; Jeannie Vanasco's unsparing memoirs (Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl and The Glass Eye); the gothic novels of Paraic O'Donnell (The House on Vesper Sands and The Maker of Swans); and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's acclaimed novel, A Girl is a Body of Water.
Books Cochran has edited have garnered attention from the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and NPR's Fresh Air and Morning Edition. These authors have won prizes that include the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Costa Novel Prize, the Edgar Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and have been finalists for the National Book Award for nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and PEN Literary Awards.
Forthcoming authors include Joy Williams, Kim Fu, Sarah Krasnostein, Courtney Maum, Morgan Talty, María José Ferrada, and Elizabeth Brooks.
