About David

Photographs by Gilbert Rios

I’m a native of North Carolina, a graduate of Wake Forest University, and grew up in a reading family. I don’t remember a vacation when anyone was without a stack of favorite books. For me it was always the latest novel by Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald or history from David McCullough and Robert K. Massie.

I got my start in New York at Avon Books and William Morrow, and then moved to Putnam where I had the good fortune to edit some beloved novels including Lee Child’s Killing Floor, his debut featuring the iconic Jack Reacher, and Greg Iles’ The Quiet Game, the first Penn Cage novel. On the nonfiction side, I edited Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer, an explosive exploration of the Jack the Ripper case, Goldie Hawn’s Goldie: A Lotus Grows in the Mud, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill and What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been edited by Robert Cowley.

I returned to William Morrow/HarperCollins in 2005 and acquired and edited many favorite novels including Greg Iles’ Natchez Burning, Patricia Cornwell’s Autopsy, Matthew Quirk’s The Night Agent, Brad Meltzer’s The Lightning Rod, Wiley Cash’s A Land More Kind Than Home, Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing, Brad Taylor’s Hunter Killer and many more. My nonfiction titles included Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger’s Highest Duty, Al Michaels’ You Can’t Make This Up, Sean Parnell’s Outlaw Platoon and Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball.

I left the corporate world to work independently in 2022 and since then have worked with major publishers and literary agents as well as writers eager to be in business with them. I’m also a member of the Independent Editors Group (IndependentEditorsGroup.com). 

I live in upstate New York with my husband Greg and our Norwich terrier Mac. When I’m not reading and editing, I’m gardening, helping produce an annual book festival at the Spencertown Academy Arts Center, and leading tours as a museum docent at the Clark Art Institute.