Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: As the school year winds down and we get ready to welcome our summer assistant editors, we also say goodbye to Caitlin Doyle and Molly Reid, who have been CR editors for two years now (they were two-thirds of the editorial team who inaugurated our miCRo series in Fall 2018). We’d like to cheer their recent successes and wish them well as they move on to their next adventures.
Caitlin Doyle has been a source of cheer in the office, from her introductory “Hey hey” as she enters the room, to her general sense of merriment. Who else can brag they have a paper-doll Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas? We do, thanks to Caitlin! Her particular strength as an editor has been her picks for our miCRo series, one of which won the Pushcart Prize last year. For each piece she chose, Caitlin wrote a meticulous and thoughtful introduction, feeling the need to serve each writer well. Her blog posts were equally as discerning, astute, and carefully crafted.
And she’s had a big year in her own writing life. She won a $15,000 PEO Scholar Award, as well as the organization’s Presidential Endowed Scholar Award, an honor given out only every two years to one US doctoral student. Even though she’s been spending most of her time over the past two years in our office and teaching just in the summer, she also won this year’s departmental teaching award, and last year she won the College of Arts & Sciences teaching award (given to only one doctoral student per year), as well as the overall University of Cincinnati Excellence in Teaching Award.
In the past year, Caitlin’s also held the position of visiting writer at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, AND her poems have appeared twice (see here and here) on Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry series, among many other places. This summer she’ll be on the faculty of the Frost Farm Poetry Conference.
Molly Reid‘s passion for editing has been clear over the past two years; for example, in our group copyediting sessions, she had a skill for understanding what the writers were doing, and advocating for their particular prose styles. She invested her energy in learning The Chicago Manual of Style (our industry Bible) and asked insightful questions about issues related to edits. Her picks for miCRo were equally as lauded, with some appearing in Best Microfiction 2019 and longlisted for Best Small Fictions. One writer she championed even found an agent through her publication on our site!
Molly had a big year personally too, including the release of her first book, a short-story collection called The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary, which won BOA’s annual short fiction prize. James Wood said this of the book: “Inventive, adventurous, brilliant—dryly witty but often moving—Molly Reid, with this collection, confirms her great early promise, and emerges as one of the rising stars of the American story, long and short.” Booklist called it an “unforgettable collection of moralized fables” and Kirkus deemed it “promising work from a writer interested in all creatures, great and small.”
Molly also spent time at the Sewanee Writers Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar, at the Anderson Center as a resident, and at the Chautauqua Literary Arts festival as a doctoral fellow. She’s headed to Gettysburg College next year as their Emerging Writer Lecturer.
We wish both of these fabulous writers well as they leave the office, and we’re indebted to them for their contributions!
