Sheila Weller
Editor
Sheila Weller has had a rich, thirty-year-long career writing about iconic women, women overcoming all kinds of challenges and distress, investigatives, social and cultural history, memoir, essays, columns, true crime, and human interest for myriad magazines and in eight books. As a contributor of many major, cover-lined stories to Vanity Fair, and a contributing editor and senior contributing editor of many magazines (Redbook, New York, Self, and Glamour), and as a writing teacher at Story Summit Writers School and with private clients and through talks at numerous MFA programs at major universities, she has taught many people how to craft and sell nonfiction narratives – and enthusiastically coached mentees.
She is the author of eight books, all well received and three of them best sellers. Some are biographies of iconic women – the beloved bestseller Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation (Atria, Simon & Schuster) and The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour – and The (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News (Penguin / Random House); Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge (Sarah Crichton Books, FSG). One is an acclaimed memoir, Dancing at Ciro’s: A Family’s Love, Loss and Scandal on the Sunset Strip. Others are policy-affecting feminist true crime books about unjust custody losses, domestic violence and women killed by their husbands (the mega-bestselling, trial-affecting Raging Heart, about the marriage of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson; Marrying the Hangman: A Story of Privilege, Marriage and Murder; and Alex Kelly: Growing Up Rich and Out of Control.
She has written many dozens of articles for the aforementioned magazines as well as for The New York Times, Elle, Marie Claire, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, and many other publications. She graduated from UC Berkeley.
AREAS OF SPECIALTY
Nonfiction: essays, investigatives, profiles, memoir, social and cultural history
Book proposals & article queries
Matching writers with agents and hyrbid publishers
AVAILABLE FOR
Manuscript critiques, content editing, developmental editing, private coaching and writing-career mentorship and encouragement; agent-finding advice, general helpful conversation about the industry (books, magazines, newsletters et al): how it works and how it has changed.
“Sheila Weller is a pre-eminent expert in, and practitioner of, the art of composing non-fictional prose, and is the most qualified person I can imagine to teach that art to others, whether in one-to-one work as a manuscript coach or in a larger context.
For eight years, I served as Associate Chair of the English Department of Pace University, where I spent my 30-year career as a writing professor, and I put my beliefs into practice by seeking to hire Ms. Weller as an instructor for our upper-level writing and journalism majors. I based that very practical application of my convictions primarily on the basis of her writing, which was how I got acquainted with Ms. Weller—I first read her journalism in Vanity Fair magazine and was blown away by its quality, its wit, its clarity, and its brilliant organization, which I assigned to my writing students to use as a model to study and to emulate. The articles encouraged me to seek out her longer works, and the first book of hers that I encountered was perhaps her masterpiece, Girls Like Us, of which I have since given away a dozen or so copies over the years to my more ambitious students seeking to understand how research into popular subjects can be conducted and then how the complicated results of that research can be assembled into coherent, simple-seeming prose.
I have had her in my class, several times to speak to and coach my students. After speaking about writing and the mistakes writers often make (and what they do right), she took their essays and articles home with her and came back with very useful comments and editorial directions, which they then incorporated in their finished drafts. The work they did improved significantly after that -- and I repeated the process several times over. She was also most enjoyable for the students to talk to. And her remarks on their work were witty as well as making good sense. She has a professionalism that snapped up their prose without making it slick.
She is, in short, a most qualified person to coach, to nurture, to teach anyone who wants to write, and I can recommend her enthusiastically.”
- Steven Goldleaf (former Associate Chair of the English Department of Pace University)
“I first met Sheila in 2005 as a reporter and writer at Glamour magazine. I was her assistant in developing stories about the lives of women and their compelling work around the United States as well as in Latin America. Not only did Sheila edit my stories at the sentence level, but she often reworked the broader structure of my pieces in order to let the most compelling narrative shine through. Sheila is a masterful editor. She is patient with her writers and efficient when moving copy down the editorial chain.
Sheila was a compassionate manager and an astute media coach. So generous was she with her time and guidance, that I credit much of the development of my career to Sheila’s efforts. In a professional environment that was made up mostly of Anglo-Americans from elite schools, Sheila recognized my reporting talent and helped me to develop it. She promoted my ideas and brought company-wide recognition to my work. To borrow a line from the Broadway play, Hamilton, Sheila was my advocate in the editorial “room where it happens.” My colleagues at Glamour and beyond may have had privileged upbringings and education, but I had Sheila Weller on my side. And as a young, Latinx from Queens, New York, having Sheila was a game-changer.”
- Shirley Velásquez (former editor-in-chief of Latina Magazine & executive editor of People (en Espanol)
“I’m an award-winning journalist and author, and I learned everything I know about book publishing from Sheila Weller. I first met Sheila in 2004, when she and I both worked at Glamour magazine. Sheila was the magazine’s star features writer, getting scoops and winning awards galore for her stories of world-changing women. I was the copy chief and then articles editor at the magazine, learning to pitch, write, and edit stories. Despite being busy reporting her own stories, Sheila generously gave me her time, helping me find and write stories, including the fascinating story of a California lawyer who helped free domestic violence survivors who were wrongly jailed. She became my mentor, and she has remained so to this day. I am eternally grateful to her for her help, especially when it comes to book publishing.
Sheila is truly one of a kind — generous, empathetic, wise, patient, and extremely successful and knowledgeable about all things book publishing. She is a mentor like no other, and I am immensely grateful for her help.”