She has worked in editorial positions or freelanced since 2014. She is the former managing editor of Caitlin Press, where she was responsible for evaluating submissions, diagnosing the needs of manuscripts, editing, proofreading, and ensuring each book was on schedule for printer and publishing deadlines. She received her BA (majoring in English literature and minoring in print and digital publishing, graduating with distinction) and her MA (with a specialization in print culture) from Simon Fraser University. She pursued three years of FRQSC-funded doctoral research in the English department of McGill University before leaving program to begin a different career. Holly has held writing workshops in a university setting throughout her graduate career. Furthermore, she is a tutor at the McGill Writing Centre, where she helps undergraduate and graduate students refine their essays, articles, dissertations, and funding and university applications in preparation for submission. She is also easing into her role as the writing tutor for McGill's First Peoples' House. She is enrolled in Queen's University's Professional Editing Standards Certificate and currently completing the Copyediting Standards course. She is a member of Editors Canada, where she serves as the chair of the Career Builder Committee. For a full CV, visit Holly’s LinkedIn.
Holly is an experienced developmental editor specializing in memoir and non-fiction based on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Throughout her career, she has helped writers shape manuscripts, articles, essays, and documents in varied stages and among different genres into polished works ready for submission or publication. As a substantive editor, for example, she helped one writer develop a collection of numerical data into a narrative about a city’s historical development, and she has woven a series of disconnected creative non-fiction essays into a cohesive memoir that was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. Holly has also copy-edited a number of texts, including an academic monograph, an academic book chapter written in English by a native French speaker, and numerous poetry manuscripts, with edits adhering to different manuals and to varying degrees depending on the context. For instance, she has copyedited a poetry manuscript according to Greg Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style, and applied the Chicago Manual of Style with discretion to a poetry manuscript written in African American Vernacular English. Texts such as these provided her with the opportunity to consider when an editorial practice might be in line with the legacy of colonialization, and how to amend that practice.