Freelance Editing

“Wendy Call is an editor extraordinaire: professional, friendly, and detail-oriented. As my editor in Telling True Stories, Wendy took the time to not only listen to my words but also to hear what my heart had to say. I'd be happy to work with her again.”

– Loung Ung, Author, First They Killed My Father and Lucky Child and Contributor, Telling True Stories

“The day before I received Wendy's editorial letter on my draft book manuscript, I wrote in my writing process journal, ‘I am in the dark. I can’t keep working because I can’t see what to do next. Please someone turn on the light and guide me!’ Wendy's thorough, detailed editing turned on that light and guided me carefully and confidently out of the darkness. I’m tremendously grateful to have worked with Wendy as a developmental editor and recommend her highly.”

– Christa Kuljian, Author, Darwin’s Hunch, Sanctuary, and the forthcoming Our Science, Ourselves

“I am so grateful to Wendy Call for her editing, coaching, and guidance in crafting the book proposal for my memoir. Thanks to Wendy's astute direction and inside perspective on the publishing process, I signed with a top literary agent.”

– Nadja Cech, PhD, Professor of Chemistry, UNC Greensboro

Wendy has served as a developmental and substantive editor for many nonfiction books, including: 

• Josephine Ensign's award-winning Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net (SheWrites Press, 2016), a memoir that has been chosen as a "Common Read" by several universities

• Jeffrey Haas's The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther  (Chicago Review Press, 2009), a memoir of a civil rights lawyer that served as inspiration and source for the 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah

• Christa Kuljian’s Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), a deeply researched book about a group of a feminist scientists who forever changed biological sciences

• Sejal Shah's This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, June 2020), an award-winning memoir in essays

• Wendy Elisheva Somerson's Embodying the World to Come (North Atlantic Books, Spring 2025), a practical
and theoretical guide to somatic therapy

• Greg R. Taylor's Lay Down Your Guns (Leafwood Publishers, 2013), a book-length profile of a Honduran doctor fighting drug cartels

• Victoria Vantoch's The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), a narrative history about U.S. and Soviet stewardesses 

• Sasha Su-Ling Welland's Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2018), a work of criticism and feminist art history by a visual anthropologist.

She has served on the editorial board of Dollars & Sense magazine, staff editor for Grassroots International, faculty advisor for two university literary journals, and co-founder / co-editor of three anthologies. She teaches occasional workshops on editing and also regularly taught an editing and publishing course at Pacific Lutheran University between 2009 and 2019.

If you are interested in talking with Wendy about her editing work, please email her.