Zoë Ruiz is the best editor one could hope for: smart, diligent, informed, passionate, and responsive. I entrusted her with a challenging book—Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War—and trusted that she could help me mold it into a work that could be read by many. She succeeded. All writers would benefit from working with her, but I will single out academic writers who wish to speak to more than just academics.
-Viet Thanh Nguyen
I have over 15 years of experience in the publishing industry and have worked on a range of projects with diverse clients. I’ve edited and guided my clients to complete different types of writing: young adult books for publishers, academic books for university presses, personal essays for literary magazines, self-published memoirs for family members, opinion essays for newspapers, and more.
I focus on line-editing and development edits. In addition to providing detailed and insightful edits, I’m deeply interested in assisting people who feel overwhelmed or blocked by their project, guiding them from start to finish.
In 2020, I edited Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s forthcoming nonfiction book to be published by Atlantic Grove. Recently, along with Dave Eggers, Amanda Uhle, and Zainab Nasrati, I co-edited I, Witness, a Norton series of nonfiction books written by young people, for young people, featured in the New York Times Book Review.
Previously I edited Nugyen’s Nothing Ever Dies, which was a finalist for The National Book Award in nonfiction and The National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction. I’ve edited writing for The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Hawkins Project, 826LA, and 826 Valencia, among other places.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Zoë Ruiz early in my career, in my work for The Rumpus, and I found her to be wonderfully detail-oriented, analytical, insightful, and, most importantly, full of ideas that greatly improved and clarified my work. She set a standard by which my future nonfiction editors were judged, and I would work with her again with extreme enthusiasm.
-J Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
Zoë Ruiz 