Ashley Strosnider is a writer and editor based in Jersey City, New Jersey, though she’s lived in six different states and will always be a southerner at heart. Her first job out of college was event planning at an indie bookstore, and ever since, she’s been working on shaping the spaces where stories meet their audiences.
These days, that means working as a freelance editor. For more than a decade, she’s partnered with novelists, memoirists, and small presses on book-length manuscripts, offering developmental editing and manuscript assessments that help writers refine structure, sharpen voice, and dig into the emotional core and the big questions of their work. She also works alongside authors Mary Adkins and Rufi Thorpe in The Book Incubator, cheering writers on, brainstorming, and offering critiques and manuscript reads as they shape early drafts and finish 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 student interns and a global community of poets, fiction writers, and editors around the world — an experience that shaped how she thinks about both craft and community. Ashley holds an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina, where she was awarded the James Dickey Fellowship. She’s since studied fiction at Tin House and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Joyland, Monkeybicycle, New South, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her fiction explores themes of family, place, and ecological change. 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
