Meet Sara Wigal of 12 South (Belmont University)

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sara Wigal

Hi Sara, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Sara Wigal is a tenured Associate Professor and Director of Publishing at Belmont University, a unique undergraduate degree that equips students with necessary skills and knowledge to enter the book world. As part of this role, she is the Editor of Belmont Story Review (www.thebelmontstoryreview.com) a literary journal.

She serves on the leadership council of Next Chapter Society, a section of the Nashville Public Library Foundation. Over her multi-year tenure with NCS she has led the organization as a co-chair, as Fundraising Chair, and most recently as the originator of the Author Ambassador program and a member of the Membership Committee.

She is the Executive Director of the WriterFest Nashville (www.writerfestnashville.com) conference for writers of book, song, and screen, and of WriterFest Studio and Ami McConnell Literary Agency. She is the founder of the Nashville Publishing Meetup, a group for industry contacts to network without being client-facing, which has since become WriterFest Pros. In her capacity with AMLA she acts as a literary agent, manages staff, designs and co-hosts event series, and runs A Dolly Good Time, an annual benefit for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Everything is about books and readers!

She got her masters in publishing and writing in 2011 from Emerson College and got her start in literature working at several magazines including the acclaimed journal, Ploughshares, as well as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt before she became a book publicist and later, an academic.

Wigal has been published by Library Journal, The Tennessean, Publishers Weekly, Writer’s Digest and various literary journals. She is an aspiring historical fiction novelist and writer of the personal essay. Find her frequently on Instagram at @yourpublishingprofessor.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Ha! Zeroing in on my work with Belmont Story Review, I would say one of the larger obstacles has been time—there is just never enough of it. But, one way we overcame that was by shifting our reading period from just during one semester to now working in both fall and spring semesters on the journal. That has meant a much slower pace of work for the student editors and myself!

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I have had a very strange career— very few people transition from publishing into academia and teaching the business of publishing! There are only a handful of programs around the country, to my work as an educator puts me in a small category of amazing nationwide professionals working in the space. I teach undergraduates the business of book publishing to set the up as future career professionals in the industry.

I would say I am most known for sort of “knowing it all” about publishing, which is not to say my expertise and knowledge is truly literally comprehensive, but I do tend to “know a guy” for even the things I don’t know! It’s a fun thing, to be a connector, as Malcolm Gladwell names people like me that just love making introductions. I have the joy of helping people (students and clients) learn about publishing from a wide variety of angles, but I’m also good at pulling in a heavier or different weight hitter than myself, so to speak.

In my role as Editor at BSR, I get to help students through this practicum course learn about the different aspects of literary publishing (editorial, social media, submissions management, etc).

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Perserverence, integrity, adaptability!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thebelmontstoryreview.com
• Instagram: belmontstoryreview
• Facebook: belmontstoryreview