Constance Hale

Constance Hale has been working as a writer, editor, and literary coach for 25 years. After receiving degrees from Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Connie worked as a reporter and editor at the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health magazines. Her freelance writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, and Honolulu–as well as in Writer’s Digest and The Writer. Born in Hawaii, Connie loves to write about the islands and other unusual places; her travel essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous anthologies. She is the author of two books on language, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style, and has been dubbed “Marion the Librarian on a Harley, or E. B. White on acid.”

Connie is an instructor at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where she  teaches narrative journalism to midcareer fellows. In 2008 and 2009 she was the chair of the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston. She also teaches at U.C. Berkeley Extension. She has coached writers as young as nine and as old as ninety.

Connie works as a freelance editor for Harvard Business School Press, on books whose subjects range from black and white women in corporate America to the invention of the Segway. She also edits for private clients, whether community leaders penning their memoirs or Po Bronson writing about families. She is an ideal editor for magazine features, book-length nonfiction, and travel memoirs. Her favorite work, though, is line editing: making the sentences of a story sing.