Bio

Deborah Emin, originally began her career in trade publishing doing everything from answering the phones to reading the manuscripts in the slush pile.

Eventually, she worked as an editor at a small trade publisher (now defunct) and on a freelance basis. She also learned the business of scientific, technical and medical publishing where she was a copywriter and then worked on the marketing of professional books in a number of scientific disciplines. In addition to her years of publishing experience, she has taught writing for over 15 years in a number of settings to over 1,000 students. In addition to being the publisher of Sullivan Street Press, Deborah is also one of its authors and the impressario of the Itinerant Book Show. And as program director for the REZ Reading Series in Kew Gardens, Queens, she brings readers and writers together on regular basis in her own neighborhood.

Deborah Emin lives and works mostly in her Queens apartment.

She is hard at work on a number of projects that include a new novel, Scags at 18, as well as a number of short stories and a few articles to help her spread the word about the things she cares about—travel, politics and books.

She has taught writing to a variety of students for many years and while she enjoyed that work immensely and credits her students with truly teaching her how to write, now that she has learned she is spending more time writing and less time teaching. That doesn’t mean that she has ended her teaching career altogether, only that she is more selective about which students she works with.

Partly this is just her need to have more time to write without lots of other peoples’ stories rumbling around in her head. She prefers to wake up in the middle of the night with a solution to her own plot dilemmas rather than thinking about her students’ stories.

Her background, academically, was primarily as a literary critic as opposed to a writer. She did study with a few writers but found their methods and her needs rarely coincided. What impressed her most about working with writing students who were truly interested in literature was how generous they were. In a matter of a few weeks, these students could explain and explore their connection to writing, to their own processes and to what made their need to write a significant part of their daily lives.

Now at the tail end of a long and perhaps too lengthy learning curve, Deborah is engaged in trying to find that perfect balance between wanting to tell a very good story and wanting that story to explore and question the confluence of art, politics and the spiritual. When she sits down every day to write, she is grateful to so many people for the kind of encouragement they have provided her in order to make this dream a reality.