Constance Hale

Constance Hale has been working as a writer, editor, and literary coach for 35 years. She has edited more than three dozen books, scores of magazine articles, and a handful of book proposals. She loves helping writers realize their dreams and considers her editing style to be sensitive and supportive. But she also hews to high standards and pushes writers to do their very best work.

Connie describes her own process in the book Editors Talk About Editing, in which she appears alongside legendary editors like Adam Moss and Ileene Smith. She has worked for 20 years 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, public officials debating policy, or narrative journalists dipping a toe into the really long form. 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.

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 New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, Afar, and Honolulu—as well as in Writer’s Digest and The Writer. Born in Hawai‘i, 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 three books on language (Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style), as well as two related books, a hula biography, and a children’s book.

Connie has taught midcareer fellows at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, and in 2008 and 2009 she was the chair of the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston. She has directed a narrative conference at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and teaches at U.C. Berkeley Extension and Harvard Extension. She also leads writers retreats in California and Hawai‘i. She has coached writers as young as nine and as old as ninety.