Praxis Course: JackLeg Press Editorial Internship
Semester: Spring 2026
Faculty Advisor/Professor: Daniel Torday
Community Partner: JackLeg Press
Praxis Site Supervisor: Dr. Jennifer Harris
Praxis Poster:
PIS LeeCheeseman
Further Context:
This semester, I served as an editorial intern for JackLeg Press, a small independent publisher of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama. I’d been trying (and failing) to get a publishing/editorial internship since the summer before my freshman year of college so I was so excited this opportunity came along! My work consisted of reading through JackLeg’s backlog of fiction and creative nonfiction queries, short excerpts authors submit from longer completed manuscripts. I rated and reviewed each piece based on JackLeg’s specific standards and gave my recommendations for whether I believed they should move on to the next round of evaluation. While most of the pieces I read were not to my taste or not up to JackLeg’s standards, I still felt like I was learning from everything I read. In almost every piece I found an element of syntax, style, or language that I could incorporate into my own writing. I also encountered genres and types of writing that I never would’ve sought out on my own, broadening my horizons and understanding of what literary fiction and creative nonfiction can be.
In my coursework, I read The World She Edited by Amy Reading, a biography of Katerine S. White, a Bryn Mawr alumna who went on to become an incredibly influential fiction editor at The New Yorker. I went on to apply many of the things I learned about her editorial process to my own work with JackLeg. It was also just fascinating to learn about the life and legacy of a Bryn Mawr alumna who I hadn’t before heard of, I even found out we shared many things in common! For example, she was an editor for the Tipyno’bob, Bryn Mawr’s student literary magazine during her time and I’m an editor for Nimbus, Bryn Mawr’s current literary magazine!
One of the coolest aspect of my internship was that I got to go to AWP, the largest conference for writers and publishers in North America! It was an amazing opportunity to feel for the first time that I was surrounded by a community of writers and artists all supporting one another. I went to panels on a wide array of topics hosted by writers I deeply admire such as Deesha Philyaw and Richard Siken.
In my time with JackLeg I absolutely felt myself grow both as a writer and an editor. The skills I learned from reading and critiquing so many pieces are absolutely valuable in their own right but they also helped me bring a more critical eye to my own creative writing which will be incredibly useful to me as I prepare to begin my creative writing capstone next semester.