Winter 2014 Staff

Hometown and state: Henderson, Nevada

Staff positions: Assistant Art Director & Twitter Manager

Favorite or least favorite part of editing: I love checking for commas! Commas are so small, yet they add so much meaning!

Favorite vacation locale: Rome, Italy

One vacation necessity: credit card

Favorite quote: “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” —C.S. Lewis

Hometown and state: Plymouth, Minnesota

Staff positions: Copyeditor & Pinterest Manager

Career goals: Write a best seller, make tons of money, and go live in Africa

Favorite vacation experience (make it short!): One of the more magical moments of my life is when I fed a lemur a banana straight out of my mouth…I think it was magical for him too.

One vacation necessity: An extra suitcase or duffel for souvenirs

Dream travel location: New Zealand to see the Lord of the Rings film locations

Hometown and state: Hercules, California

Staff positions: Assistant Art Director & Web Programming Manager

Career goals: I want to be an English teacher, editor, writer, mom, wife, traveler, and world-changer.

I never leave home without: Blistex Herbal Answer chapstick

Favorite quote: “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” —Albus Dumbledore

I have never . . . regretted a travel risk I’ve taken, only risks I did not take.

Hometown and state: Sandy, Utah

Staff positions: Assistant Art Director & Assistant Advertising Director

Career goals: I want to write historical fiction and nonfiction, teach community classes on family history, and research my ancestors–All in a day’s work.

Favorite or least favorite part of editing: I love substantive editing. I love to help a story bloom by offering a new perspective and a new idea. Authors can do incredible things with a spark lit by an editor.

One vacation necessity: Stopping at a cemetery. Preferably one that has an ancestor buried in it, but any quaint little cemetery will do. Amazing the stuff you can learn in those places.

Other interesting travel tidbit: You know, I always feel like a dumb tourist when I pull out my camera. Don’t be like me. I’ve missed out on capturing a lot of memories solely because of my self-consciousness. Go forth and capture those memories!

Hometown and state: Houston, Texas

Staff position: Art Director

Career goals: Be an editor, layout designer, and possibly web designer on the side.

Favorite or least favorite part of editing: I love when I get to the references section. Most of the time, I can listen to an audiobook while I edit those sections.

I never leave home without: my Camelbak water bottle

Other interesting travel tidbit: When getting out into the wild, make sure your map has been updated in the past couple of years, and make sure your compass is calibrated according to the magnetic declination of the area. Some of us have found that out the hard way . . .

Hometown and State: Alpine, UT

Staff positions: Senior Editor & Online Outreach Manager

Favorite vacation experience: When my brother, sister, and I were in Athens, we happened upon the stadium from the first modern Olympic Games, which was reconstructed from the remains of an ancient Greek stadium. It was empty, so we stepped over the little partition and ran a victory lap in the Olympic stadium. The experience was quite thrilling!

Favorite quote: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” —St. Augustine

I have never . . . not gotten sunburned while on vacation

Dream travel location: Jerusalem

Hometown and state: Fort Worth, Texas

Staff positions: Associate Editor & Assistant Web Director

Favorite or least favorite part of editing: My favorite part of editing is seeing the end result. I love helping an author get their message across in a clearer way.

Favorite vacation experience: In Mexico, my study abroad group and I went to swim in a few different cenotes, or sinkholes that expose underground water. On a trip to one cenote, some of the students jumped from ground level all the way into the underground cavern. I was the first girl who attempted it!

Favorite quote: “All that glisters is not gold.” —Prince Morocco in The Merchant of Venice

Other interesting travel tidbit: At the airport in Cancun, you don’t have to take your shoes off when going through security.

Hometown and state: Fort Scott, Kansas

Staff positions: Senior Designer & Advertising Director

Favorite or least favorite part of editing: Fact-checking. Nothing is more tedious than fact-checking.

One vacation necessity: A NECK PILLOW.

I have never . . . been outside of North America.

Dream travel location: London

Other interesting travel tidbit: When traveling between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, make sure you know whether the time zone is the same. Once I traveled from Mexico City to Dallas, Texas, which are normally in the same time zone. I thought I had an extra hour to make it to my next flight, but I didn’t realize that the United States’ daylight savings time had taken place a month before Mexico’s. So I missed my flight and had to wait in the middle of the airport for another six hours while my family waited at home for me with a big roast dinner as a “welcome home” party.

Hometown and state: Camarillo, CA

Staff positions: Senior Designer & Web Director

Career goals: I currently plan to pursue a career as a software engineer.

I never leave home without: my umbrella. You never know when it’s going to rain, and I hate being wet and not being able to change.

Favorite quote: “Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh . . . everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?” —Han Solo in A New Hope

Other interesting travel tidbit: Always do your research. I once had to stand outside for over an hour in the snow because I told the hotel I was at the South Jordan Trax station when I was really at the South Jordan FrontRunner station.

Hometown: Tokyo, Japan

Staff positions: Senior Editor and Social Media Director

Career goals: My dream is to work in the theatre industry in New York both as a performer and a writer/editor.

Favorite vacation experience: It’s a tie between when the pigeons pooped in my parents’ pasta in Italy and when I was at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh museum and learned that the man cut his own ear off: both very vivid memories of my childhood.

One vacation necessity: Deodorant. Some places don’t sell the stick kind.

Dream travel location: I’d like to spend a summer in Florence, a Christmas in Vienna, and any season in Jerusalem.

Hometown and state: Orange, California

Staff positions: Copyeditor & Facebook Manager

Favorite book: Harry Potter. It changed my life. Long story.

Favorite vacation experience: At a grocery store in Mexico, a very short native man asked me where I was from. I told him California, and then he asked me if I was a giant! (I’m only 5’9”.) My Spanish wasn’t that great at the time, but I definitely heard him correctly. I told him I was not and that lots of people in the United States are as tall as me.

I never leave home without: I wish I could say Chapstick, but, sadly, I almost always forget it.

Dream travel location: Even though I have an extreme (and irrational) fear of bugs, the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil has been my dream travel location since 4^th grade.

Hometown and state: Woodinville, Washington

Staff position: Assistant Managing Editor

Favorite book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Favorite vacation experience: Hiking to and camping at Silver Lake, UT. My wife, Tiffany, and I got a late start and ended up hiking in the dark. Behind us was a storm, constantly shooting lightning. It looked amazing.

One vacation necessity: Good people to spend it with.

I never leave home without: A book.

Hometown and state: Vancouver, WA

Staff position: Managing Editor

Career goals: To become the creative director for either a publication or corporation

I never leave home without: a cute pair of shoes

Favorite quote: “Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life—well, valuable, but small—and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around? I don’t really want an answer.” —You’ve Got Mail

Other interesting travel tidbit: I have slept in Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. (I was a baby and my parents were on a tour.)

Hometown and state: Santa Rosa, California

Staff positions: Assistant Managing Editor & Instagram Manager

Favorite or least favorite part of editing: Feeling like my edits are actually helpful to the author is always a plus. I could live without source checking, but I guess someone needs to do it.

Favorite vacation experience: Well, I don’t know about “favorite,” but there was this one time when my best friend and I somehow managed to get ourselves locked inside a car in England—yes, it is possible (electronic locks and a dead battery). Oh, did I mention the four pre-teens in the backseat threatening to break open the windows? It was a hoot. Actually, it really was. I will never forget those four hours of my life.

I never leave home without: Burt’s Bees Lip Balm

Dream travel location: Ireland. It’s time I visited the motherland.

Staff position: Editor in Chief

Career: Before becoming a professor at BYU in 2005, I worked for 28 years as a full-time editor and writer for the Ensign and Liahona magazines, both of which are distributed worldwide. For more than half of those years, I was managing editor of the Liahona.

Hometown and state: South Jordan, Utah

Staff position: Editorial Advisor

Career goals: I am currently working on projects for Covenant Communications and Ancestry.com as a freelance editor and writer. But I would love to edit full time for a book or magazine publisher.

One vacation necessity: A safety pin. I’ve learned my lesson in the past: whenever I don’t have one, I always find that I need one desperately when something—my pack or my tent—rips open or becomes unstitched at the seams during my trip.

I never leave home without: A water bottle, my favorite flavor of Trident gum, and Blistex Raspberry Lemonade Blast.

Favorite quote: “You never finish revising; you just run out of time.”

Hometown and state: Provo, Utah

Staff Position: Advertising Advisor

Career goals: My current position is that of Office Specialist at the BYU Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. I edit scholarly publications, plan trips and events, and do office work. In the future, I’d love to edit books for a fiction publishing company or use editing to help businesses look better in print.

Favorite vacation experience: I went to Canada for two weeks with my family when I was eight. We stayed in bungalows, did a lot of hiking, and got to walk on the Athabasca Glacier.

One vacation necessity: sunglasses

Favorite quote: “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” —Victor Hugo