Beckie Weinheimer is the American Library Association Best Books award-winning author of Converting Kate (Viking Books). She has also published feature articles, short stories, and poems in magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, including Huffington Post and PBS’s Next Avenue. She’s represented by Marilyn Biderman at Transatlantic Agency.

She has a MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College and has created curriculum, taught writing courses and led writing workshops from coast to coast. Passionate about creative writing, her most rewarding professional experiences have been seeing writers use her lessons or edits to create stories which they have gone on to publish.

As an instructor she believes great writing is a combination of voice and craft. Great writers are not simply born with the skill—with encouragement, anyone can become a great writer. She sees herself as the kind of teacher and editor that mentors writers to find their own voice and guides them to hone their creative writing skills.

As an editor she feels she can learn more from what works in a student or client’s writing than she can from only critiquing what doesn’t work. Of course, critique is necessary, and when combined with dialogue to the writer regarding what they are trying to express, it can be very successful in helping them achieve that goal.