Testimonials

Sarah Dimick

Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University, in the acknowledgements of Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia University Press, 2024), 237.

Consultations with Michelle Niemann provided insightful feedback and intellectual fellowship during an isolating pandemic.

Claire Seiler

Professor of English, Dickinson College, in the acknowledgements of Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Michelle Niemann offered clear-eyed, whip-smart, and refreshingly practical advice as I prepared the manuscript for review.

Michelle Phelps

Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in the acknowledgements of The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Writing coach Michelle Niemann was invaluable in speeding along the initial book drafting. She was the first reader on nearly every page of writing and made the process of revising infinitely easier.

Lisa Hollenbach

Assistant Professor of English, Oklahoma State University, in the acknowledgements of Poetry FM: American Poetry and Radio Counterculture (University of Iowa Press, 2023)

My writing coach and friend, Michelle Niemann, deserves special mention; her expertise, feedback, and conversation informed much of this book and was a lifeline to me during the most isolating years of the pandemic.

Mary Mullen

Associate Professor of English and faculty member in the Center for Irish Studies, Villanova University, and author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

Working with Michelle made an immensely stressful process—finishing a draft of my first book manuscript—actually fun. Her careful reading of chapter drafts, smart insights about structure, quick responses to my own ideas for revision, and calm demeanor helped me better understand how to communicate my argument while also reminding me why I care about this argument. She is a brilliant editor who shows that writing is an inherently social act.

Michael P. Cohen

Author of The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (1984), The History of the Sierra Club 1892-1970 (1988), A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin (1998), Granite and Grace: Seeking the Heart of Yosemite (University of Nevada Press, 2019), and George C. Williams and Evolutionary Literacy (Palgrave, 2022)

Michelle Niemann is that great editor you thought you would never find. Her work excels on every level. She finds solutions to the largest structural problems, while paying attention to the minutia that drive every writer to distraction. Yet all this is done with such kindness and generosity that one never feels anything but gratitude. And she is quick too. She truly inspires confidence, never gives up, and always suggests viable options. As a lifelong teacher of writing, I can count on one hand those who successfully taught me. She is one of them. I don’t know how I got along without her for so long.

Allison Carruth

Professor in the Program in American Studies and High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University, and author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP, 2013), and Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Michelle is a gifted editor, researcher, and collaborator. Her coaching process in particular offers an innovative and flexible structure for ongoing writing support, and Michelle does a brilliant job of balancing big picture thinking about one’s projects and goals with nitty gritty and practical strategies for cultivating a regular writing practice.

Ursula K. Heise

Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies, Department of English, Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, UCLA, and author of Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Michelle Niemann is the single best editor I have ever worked with. Her deep knowledge of several fields in the humanities and social sciences, her sharp intellect and sense of what makes for persuasive arguments, and her meticulous attention to detail have been enormously useful to me in improving both the substance and the form of my book chapters and essays on three different projects. She is also a superb project manager who knows how to keep as many as fifty contributors to a volume on track and on time. With her additional excellence in proofreading and indexing, she delivers manuscripts that press editors praise, with real astonishment, for their polish and consistency, leaving their in-house copy-editors with only minor tasks. Michelle accomplishes all of this with a consistent good cheer and sense of humor that helps even the most harried of writers through the editorial process.