LARB Publishing Workshop Expands Career Opportunities for UC Graduate Students
By Victoria Le, UCHRI Undergraduate Intern
Writer and aspiring publisher Arielle Burgdorf said they feared their chances of working in publishing would be slim, and found the conversations surrounding the job market to be “depressing.”
So Burgdorf, a PhD candidate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz, turned to the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop for guidance.
This year, UCHRI partnered with LARB to fund two PhD students interested in pursuing a career in publishing. Furthering its mission of facilitating professionalization and opening career paths for graduate students, UCHRI covered the $3,000 tuition for both students.
After the intensive summer training program, Burgdorf told UCHRI they’d left the LARB Publishing Workshop with an essential message: “No matter what you like to write, there is room for you in publishing.”
The author of the novel Prétend, whose writings and translations have appeared in several publications, Burgdorf said the publishing workshop gave them a “zoomed out understanding of publishing.”
“I got to see how many people are involved in making a book succeed (or fail),” they explained. “As an author of a novel at a small press, it was exciting to see the wide variety of different approaches presses take towards marketing—this included merchandise, sending books to influencers, and author events.”
Like Burgdorf, Bex Jones, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Davis, said the publishing industry seemed elusive and impossible to navigate before the workshop.
“I was profoundly unaware of the variety of jobs available in the publishing industry,” Jones said. “The industry can be quite hard to read and understand from the outside, so a lot of insight about what jobs exist comes from knowing someone in the industry.”
Over the course of the publishing workshop, both Burgdorf and Jones were tasked with completing a central, publishing-related project. Both worked on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
For Burgdorf, this meant reimagining the story in an experimental form by adapting the novel through a fantasy angle. Burgdorf focused on Sales and Distribution for the project, which they said was useful for their own work as a recent debut author.
“Another idea that came up again and again in the workshop is that if you want to work for a publisher, and especially a small press, you will end up wearing lots of different hats, so they are looking for people who have a wide variety of different skills rather than just one particular specialization,” Burgdorf said.
Jones, for her project, reimagined the novel as feminist speculative fiction, giving editorial notes and creating marketing materials, including a book cover and logo.
“The story we worked on turned into something of which I am very proud. The experience of having someone read my work with such detail and careful consideration was an enormous privilege and taught me a great deal about my tendencies and strengths as a writer,” said Jones.
Jones also worked towards publishing her own work in PubLab — the official annual publication of the LARB Publishing Workshop. She worked closely with Christina Wood, a magazine editor and fiction writer, to craft her story, “The Ceaseless Song.”
“It was the developmental editing talks and workshops that really opened my eyes to the broader considerations of publishing fiction, non-fiction and academic texts,” said Jones, speaking of her time at the LARB Publishing Workshop.
“I found myself thinking more intently about the communicative capacity of both my academic work and my fiction writing—that reaching an audience is as much about telling a story that people can place in their own context as it is about telling them something new.”
Find out more about the LARB Publishing Workshop at larbpublishingworkshop.org. Applications for 2025 are due on April 1 and LARB will be hosting informational sessions on February 12, March 3, and March 12, 2025.
