Editorial Services

Since 2010, I have worked with a range of clients, including professionals who want to write a book that solidifies their expertise and thought leadership within a particular field, seasoned authors working on a new manuscripts, first time writers trying out new forms, and museum curators collaborating with many contributors working on exhibition catalogues. I offer a range of editorial services and coaching, including:

• Book Proposal Coaching

• Developmental Editing

• Content Editing

• Publishing Strategy Consultations

• Line Editing

• Copy Editing

• Boutique One-on-One Creative Writing Courses

  If you’re interested in working together, drop me a line at aydenlmgrout [at] gmail [dot] com with some information about what kind of support you’re looking for and the project, and I will offer a quote.

Select Editorial projects

Below are a selection of book-length projects that I have worked on with clients.

Hopi Kachina Dolls: Blessings for a Balanced World, Edited by Colleen Lucero, Nancy Rosoff, & Dare Turner, Brooklyn Museum, Exhibition Catalogue, 2026

• Content Editing and Editorial Positioning

  Kachina dolls (tithu) represent the Katsinam, the ancestral spirits who bring blessings of clouds, rain, and other gifts to the Hopi people to keep the world in balance. For longer than memory, Katsinam have gifted tithu to Hopi girls and women from infancy to marriage. These gifts are foundational to a Hopi woman’s identity, yet previous publications have overlooked this vital and enduring relationship. Hopi Kachina Dolls: Blessings for a Balanced World radically centers the perspectives of women and girls and offers a new model for understanding and appreciating art emergent from this cultural tradition.
  
  To showcase kachina dolls’ everlasting significance, this book features artworks dating from the nineteenth century to the present, including finely crafted tithu as well as exquisite contemporary ceramics, baskets, and jewelry created by Hopi women artists. Newly commissioned photography and interviews with Hopi community members provide an intimate view into their lived experiences. This volume reframes art historical understandings of tithu, illuminates the powerful role of the Katsinam in Hopi society, and highlights the ingenuity of women creatives whose artwork builds on long-standing cultural legacies.

Appetite Obscure by Albert Alexander

• Editorial & Publishing Strategy Consultation, Developmental Editing

Appetite Obscure is a surrealist dining collective founded by Albert Alexander and Richie Rhombus. They create what they call Interaction Dishes, where each dish is an experiment stretching the bounds of eating and serving that is part of a larger interactive experience. Since 2013, they have hosted dozens of events for over 1,000 people. For example, in Richie’s Windy Sea Storm (on the cover), the diner stands in two bucket of water (one hot, one cold), wears safety goggles, and is fed white fish and mango salsa while a powerful fan blows arugula in their face. A typical potluck will have between 30 and 200 participants and at least 10 such dishes.

This book brings together menus and recipes from a decade of Appetite Obscure’s events, alongside tales of their exploits from storm drains and on forgotten islands.

This is For You by Lea Redmond, HarperOne, 2025

• Condensing Content and Organizing Material

  Riddled with obligation, expense, and waste, gifts are often reduced in our consumeristic culture to products for purchase. We all want to give good gifts—but how?

  In This Is for You, artist and bestselling author Lea Redmond casts a vision for gift-giving as you’ve never seen it before. At their best, she proposes, gift-giving and receiving are an opportunity to practice relational care at every scale for the wellbeing of people and planet.

  “Gifts are relationships in miniature,” Redmond writes—a way to honor the spaces between us and practice the best of our humanity. Beyond the usual gift guide, This Is for You is a manifesto on open-hearted living that can enrich our relationships and awaken us to the world and its inherent abundance.

  With inspired ideas and stories that sparkle, Redmond empowers you to be generous in your kinkeeping, courageous in your connection, and surprised by your own capacity for creativity.

Experience Design by Abraham Burickson, Yale University Press, 2024

• Developmental Editing

  What does it mean to design experiences? Traditional design practices invite us to design things, and to use those things to solve problems. But experience is not a problem; it is life. Experience designers engage with unpredictability and the unknown, partnering with their audiences to generate possibility and relationality. Experience designers create worlds, craft narratives that leave the page and enter people’s lives, and structure transformation. Broadly interdisciplinary and deeply human, experience design is a practice that at once embraces new technologies and offers a balm for our disconnected lives.
   
  In this playful, accessible, and visually engaging book, Burickson lays out ten basic principles for this emerging practice. Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto invites the reader to stop making things and, instead, to craft the minutes and hours of human life. Rigorous and philosophical, the book guides the reader through the processes of empathic research; constructing worlds not just for fantasy fiction but in schools, communities, homes; and mastering the tools necessary to work coherently across disciplines to create new experiences. Whether you are a maker of immersive theater, an architect, a graphic designer, a community organizer, or just someone hoping to give a better gift, this book offers a vision of creating that is both new and as old as civilization.