Yasmine Anderson (’11) on her Passion for Literature and Editing
Yasmine Anderson (’11) shares with us how her early experience at CHS influenced the direction of her academic pursuits, ultimately earning a PhD in Composition from the University of Pittsburgh with her distinguished dissertation.
She also shares her professional journey, including the founding of her freelance copyediting business called Other Words Editing.
Yasmine successfully balances managing her editing business, working in digital marketing, co-hosting a reading club, and having a personal life, all while remaining committed to promoting inclusivity in literature.
She shares her story here:
I grew up in Roanoke and graduated from Community High School in 2011. Community High School’s excellent literature classes were a big part of what motivated me to earn my BA in English from the University of Virginia in 2015. I received my MA from the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities in 2016 and my PhD in Composition from the University of Pittsburgh in 2024. I was lucky to complete my doctoral dissertation, “Changing Blues: The Continued Life and Appropriation of Black Women’s Blues in Twenty-First Century Popular Culture,” under the generous guidance of Dr. Shaun Myers and received the University of Pittsburgh’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Dissertation Prize.
After graduating, I started my freelance copyediting business, Other Words Editing (OWE). I’m passionate about contributing to the publication of diverse work as both a writer and an editor. My own work has been published in Feminist Spaces, African American Review, and Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America. From 2022 to 2023, I was the Editorial Assistant for constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space, and I have worked as both a copyeditor and editorial intern at Autumn House Press. At OWE, I embrace the opportunity to work with pieces that are experimental in their use of language or form, but I have copyedited everything from graduate school applications to letters to politicians. I’m currently living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia with my fiancé – we’re getting married this May! In addition to running OWE, I work as a copyeditor at a digital marketing company and co-host a reading club.
