More Kindness from Authors

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Well, it’s starting to look like I need some sort of special section for the incredible kindnesses extended to me by the brilliant people who let me tinker with their words! My addition today has me all kinds of verklempt–it’s from the acknowledgements of the new and transformative book Life Under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What To Do about Them, by Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn:

It is hard to figure out how to appropriately acknowledge and thank the marvelous Letta Page, who painstakingly poured over every chapter of this book providing us with important edits and insightful comments and helping us hone honestly everything about the book. It would be easier to figure out how to acknowledge Letta if that was all she did. But she also became our most trusted confidant and the person with whom we were most vulnerable (with our ideas). She made writing this book possible and even joyful. Letta, we aren’t sure we would have gotten here without you. Thank you for all you gave us, the words and beyond.

About Letta Page

I am a disarmingly earnest editor, translator of academia, nonfiction revisionary, and domesticated roustabout. More professionally, I might say: I am the senior managing editor of Contexts, founding associate editor and producer of The Society Pages, and a sociology editor, jargon-slayer, and “book doula” for hire. My specialty is in helping authors identify and hone their arguments in ways their target audiences can both understand and use. In this way, I’m a translator, consultant, writing coach, and editor all in one. The senior managing editor of Contexts magazine (the public outreach journal of the American Sociological Association), I have more than two decades’ experience in academic editing across a range of disciplines. I’ve edited and written copy for publications from Oxford University Press, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, W.W. Norton, the University of Chicago Press, Cambridge University Press, Stanford University Press, and many others, including dozens of journals. Today, I specialize in sociology and, as a sort of fun “palate cleanser” (trust me, when you’re editing books on neoliberalism and genocide, it’s always good to have a fallback), I write copy for organizations like Stand Up! Records. I also have a background in the visual arts and was a founder of First Amendment Arts (now Co-Exhibitions) in Minneapolis, MN. I hold degrees in history and classical studies from Boston University and an art degree from the University of Minnesota, and I enjoy most of the things you can imagine Rose from The Golden Girls counts among her hobbies. I received the University of Minnesota’s Public Sociology Award, for outstanding contributions to the discipline and public conversation, in 2019. My truly lovely husband, Josh Page, is a professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota, as well as a food writer and founder of Meal magazine. He’s a great writer, and I’m so happy to work alongside him in print and in life.