Jessica Vestuto

Jessica Vestuto is a Stony Brook English BA alum and currently an editor for Mariner Books, a HarperCollins imprint. A former writer for the Stony Brook Press, Jessica has always believed in “the power of the pen.” 

What was your career journey like? How did you land on Stony Brook, decide to be an English major, and eventually go into publishing? 

Both my mom and my sister went there, and they were both English majors, so I knew for a fact that they had great professors and a really great program. It was like a financial thing too, [to] have such a high quality education and not go into so much debt was really important to me and I’m so grateful for [that] in the long run. I always loved writing in high school, I was very involved in the school paper. Sometime during my undergrad I discovered what an MFA in creative nonfiction was and it was one of those moments of, “that’s what I want to do.” That became my goal the whole time I was there. I was taking English courses, writing on the side, and working towards trying to get into those programs. I ended up going to Emerson, but the summer before that program started, […] I decided to do an internship at a publisher, at FSG, which is an imprint at Macmillan. When I was there, I [saw] what other editorial systems and editors were doing and I really fell in love with it. I still did my MFA, which was great, and at the same time I was working for a publisher in Boston.

What are your interests, what projects do you tend to be the most drawn to?

I do mostly literary fiction; as opposed to commercial fiction [which is] a little bit more story-driven, [literary fiction is] usually more of the voice and the characters than the plot. I do mostly debut authors which I really love. I’m interested in the intellectual breadth that a person can have and how long they can, hopefully for a very long time, be writing books. I’m always drawn to someone whose mind I really admire. It’s usually a little dark and a little weird, a little off-kilter. That’s the stuff that really excites me. One example is I’m working on a book [that] has vampires, but it’s playing with vampire tropes and subverts our expectation of what we think would happen to say something about culture, society, and politics.

How has your experience as an undergrad at Stony Brook benefitted you at HarperCollins? 

I learned how to speak and write about books, and that’s the foundation of everything I do now. So much of my job is hands-on, either through the jacket copy or in meetings with sales reps, I’m just trying to convince people to spend time and money on a book. I was really lucky to work with professors who encouraged me to read what I love, organize my thoughts, and express them effectively. That really shaped my editorial sensibilities. Also writing at the Stony Brook Press, I think that was the first time I really fell in love with the act of publishing something. Seeing my writing turn into a tangible object that other people could read — it’s the same thrilling feeling I get when a book I acquired comes from the printer, it just never gets old.

Lastly, what are you reading at the moment? 

I’m reading Human Acts by Han Kang. She wrote The Vegetarian and won the Booker [Prize for fiction in 2016], then the Nobel Prize [in literature] this year. She is brilliant in thinking about the world. I’m reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar too, that’s really good. One weird, fun book I’m reading is Jean Stein’s biography of Edie Sedgwick [Edie: An American Biography]. It’s a string of interviews edited together as one continuous conversation, it’s like a gossipy, illicit game of telephone that’s really fun to read.