Teamwork is important to us: teamwork amongst our editors, and a sense of team and kinship with our author-clients. There are as many opinions about style as there are writers, but we all have the same goal: making the book the best it can be.

Charity Heller, Lead Editor

Charity brings twelve years of editing experience to the Pen. She has edited almost one hundred books, including literary and commercial fiction, fantasy, romance, science fiction; non-fiction, including self-help, inspirational/motivational, and memoir/personal narrative; and copy for newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and the Web. Many novels Charity has edited have been published or have agent representation.

Charity teaches classes on editing at local colleges, via publishing groups, and at writers conferences. She participates in Northwest Independent Editors Guild, Women in Portland Publishing, Willamette Writers, The Oregon Writers Colony, and the Northwest Association of Book Publishers. Charity regularly volunteers for Willamette Writers conferences (2005 - present) as a “Manuscript ER Book Doctor,” Project Gutenberg, and has volunteered for S.M.A.R.T. (Start Making a Reader Today).

Charity is currently completing UC Berkeley’s “Professional Editing” certification class series. She received her BA in English literature in 1999. Charity lives in Portland, Oregon, with her two young children.

Karli Ebert, Associate Editor

Karli has an MS in Writing: Book Publishing from Portland State University, and a BA in International Affairs and Spanish from Eastern Washington University. When she’s not editing, Karli does book design, writes indexes and children’s books, and is a volunteer reader at Lewis and Clark Elementary. She is a member of Women in Portland Publishing, Northwest Independent Editors Guild, Willamette Writers, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and the American Society of Indexers.

Karli has climbed Mt. Fuji in Federico Garcia Lorca’s home in Spain, visited the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, but failed to make it to Timbuktu when she was in Mali. Karli lives in Columbia City, Oregon, with two rambunctious mini-schnauzers.

Nancy D’Inzillo, Editor

Nancy graduated with an English major and Writing minor from Portland State University and is attending Portland State University’s master’s program, Writing: Book Publishing, in fall, 2008. She loves to live and breathe for words. She has been writing since fourth grade, when her teacher submitted her fictional journal of an Oregon trail pioneer to a contest that allowed her to go to her first ever writer’s conference.

Since her sophomore year of college, Nancy has been editing books, stories, and marketing materials. She also works as a Peer Mentor (a specialized version of a TA) in the University Studies program at PSU and, until recently, as marketing intern in the Continuing Education department.

She spent a year living abroad in Siena, Italy and is conversationally fluent in Italian and French (which she can read but not speak). Nancy lives in northeast Portland.

Alissa Bohling, Editor

Alissa Bohling was once accused of cheating when she turned in her vocabulary test before the smartest boy in the class. Since then she has moved on to write and edit for various publications, including World Pulse Magazine, The Portland Sentinel, and The Bear Deluxe. She misses running with stray dogs, eating pumpkin-sized mangos, and washing her clothes in the pila in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, where she recently spent six months editing a bilingual magazine. Since trekking the full stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail in 2005, she still prefers to read by lamplight but usually settles for a light-emitting diode.

Alissa received her BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Montana in Missoula. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

 Contact the Mighty Pen at Editor@MightyPenEditing.com.