Ashley Strosnider is a writer and editor based in Jersey City, New Jersey, originally from Kentucky. From her first job out of college as an event planner at an indie bookstore, she has focused her work on the intersection between stories and their audience. She’s interested in creative writing, editorial leadership, and content strategy, with a focus on helping writers and organizations tell stories that carry weight.
By day, Ashley serves as Editorial Director at Compose.ly, a content agency where she oversees large-scale publishing operations and works with global brands across industries. She collaborates with a wide network of freelance writers and editors, shaping editorial standards, developing training resources, and crafting content that resonates with clarity and authority.
She has also been a freelance editor for more than a decade, specializing in book-length manuscripts. She partners with novelists, memoirists, agents, and small presses, providing developmental editing and manuscript assessments that help writers refine structure, sharpen voice, and deepen emotional resonance. She also works with writers through programs like Mary Adkins’s Book Incubator, mentoring emerging voices as they shape their projects.
Previously, Ashley served for seven years as Managing Editor of Prairie Schooner and the African Poetry Book Fund, where she worked closely with contemporary poets, fiction writers, and editors around the world. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of South Carolina, where she was awarded the James Dickey Fellowship.
Her own writing has appeared in Joyland, Monkeybicycle, New South, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, and elsewhere. Her fiction explores themes of family, place, and ecological change, with a current novel-in-progress set in contemporary Appalachia that examines the entanglement of work, environmental justice, and kinship. When she’s not editing or writing, Ashley can usually be found on a hiking trail, tending her 40+ houseplants, or watching hockey. She loves black strong coffee, dog-eared pages, grammatically ambitious prose styles, and stories with something to say.
Professional Affiliations
