What Cecelia Has Done

I am committed to helping great thinkers make their important work accessible to as many readers as possible. I greatly enjoy the challenge of working with authors who are pioneering new areas of thought or proposing innovative ways to look at old ones. I have significant experience in helping individuals find the right context, the right voice, and the right venue for telling their stories effectively and substantively. My list of clients includes journalists, scholars, memoirists, and a variety of other professionals who are interested in developing their ideas and visions for a wide readership.

Memoirs and Personal Storytelling

I’ve had the privilege of working with many people who were in the process of writing their personal stories for public consumption. Working with the gifted novelist Alix Kates Shulman (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen) on A Good Enough Daughter, her candid and moving account of returning home to care for her aging parents, reflects one end of this spectrum. My own book, Pregnancy Stories: Real Women Share the Joys, Fears, Thrills, and Anxieties of Pregnancy from Conception to Birth, represents the other. In the process of compiling a collection of stories that would represent the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in all of its emotional, physical, and psychological complexity, I sought out more than three dozen women (most with no writing experience at all) and worked closely with them as they attempted to articulate, in writing, the breadth and substance of their meaningful experiences.

History, Feminism, and Race

One of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had is the role I played in conceiving and publishing a women’s history textbook that was responsible for changing the way the field of women’s history is taught. The book, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History was originally published in 1990 and is now in its third edition, with more than 50,000 copies in print. I had the idea for a more inclusive women’s history textbook after spending a great deal of time discussing the future of the field, as well as the limitations of existing books, with prominent, forward-thinking women’s historians. Eager to publish the first and seminal work in multicultural women’s history, I approached one of the top historians in the country, Ellen DuBois of UCLA, to see if she’d be willing to serve as editor. Together we recruited another big name in the field, Vicki Ruiz of the University of Arizona, and the project was born. Now in its seventeenth year of publication, not only has the book been a bestseller in the field, but it has also greatly influenced the way people think about and teach women’s history in the U.S.

I’ve worked with a number of thinkers who have been responsible for challenging and furthering the subjects of race and ethnicity. In addition to Ellen DuBois and Vicki Ruiz, that list includes Rickie Solinger, David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Marilyn Halter. I have collaborated with these innovative thinkers on subjects including the study of whiteness and what it has to tell us about race relations, the many ways that ethnicity is marketed and sold, and the intersection of race and reproductive rights.

Most recently I have worked with Frances Smith Foster of Emory University on her book proposal and manuscript for Till Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in Antebellum African America. I also placed this groundbreaking study of African American love and marriage with Oxford University Press.

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of A Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis is another paradigm-shifting book that I had the privilege of nurturing, editing, and publishing. This study of a working-class lesbian community was based on more than thirteen years of groundbreaking oral history research. Not only did it have a major impact on the field of history, it was also an early and seminal work in the emerging field of lesbian and gay studies. I was only one of many publishing professionals eager to work with Liz and Madeline so I was thrilled when they decided to trust me with their painstaking work. Together we published their wonderful book, which would go on to win a prestigious Lamda Literary Award as well as a significant paperback deal, to a plethora of amazing reviews.

Other visionaries who have made significant contributions to the way we think about and define the history of the U.S. with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working include and Elliot Gorn, Harvey Kaye, Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, Stephanie Coontz, and John D’Emilio.

Spirituality

I spent a great deal of time working with the gifted writer, teacher, and spiritual counselor Katherine Kurs on the rich and insightful collection Searching for Your Soul: Writers of Many Faiths Share Their Personal Stories of Spiritual Discovery as she imagined the volume and subsequently searched for material to include. The book brings together the stories of more than fifty writers who have eloquently explored the spiritual impulses that inform their lives. Whether Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Mormon, Buddhist, Pagan, Vodou or Jehovah's Witness, the rich experiences shared in this volume illustrate the uneven terrain that is often part of the spiritual journey and simultaneously inspire readers to follow their spiritual paths as unorthodox or complicated as they might be.

Law

Over the years I have worked with many writers whose work has had an enormous impact on the study and practice of law. I published several works by Martha Fineman, one of the leading feminist legal theorists in the world, including The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and other Twentieth Century Tragedies. I’ve also worked with Barbara Bennett Woodhouse on her pioneering study of children’s rights, The Courage of Innocence: Children as Heroes in the Struggle for Justice, and placed the book with Princeton University Press. Most recently, I placed Victoria Nourse’s In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near Triumph of American Eugenics with W.W. Norton.