The second in a series of conversations with alumni, Sara Sargent ’07 is currently a senior executive editor at Penguin Random House. Like last week’s Grace Dignazio ’22, she’s pursued a career around writing, though the dates and details differ slightly …
To start at the very beginning, what drew you to Swarthmore?
I applied to some wild number of schools that fall. I can’t remember how many there were, twenty or something. I had been in an internship the summer going into senior year, and I had visited zero colleges, [except for] UPenn and Princeton and I hated both of them. So I just applied to a bunch of colleges and universities and I got into a handful. I visited Swarthmore and I was choosing between Swarthmore and the University of Chicago. When I came [here], I thought the campus was great, I really liked the vibe of everybody. I got to go to a party; it felt really right in a way that I’m not sure I could have articulated at the time, but certainly the size of it felt commensurate with the size of my high school class, which was only 100 kids. There was just something about the sensibility of it, and the people felt genuine and either comfortable in their own skin or comfortable being uncomfortable in their own skin. But there wasn’t a lot of pretense, and as a person who had not fit into middle school and high school, it felt like a place that offered a sense of comfort, even if I couldn’t articulate exactly why.
Did you have any particular plans after graduating?
Depends when you would ask that question. I started off as an honors major in English lit and a psychology minor. After I studied abroad in Italy, I dropped my honors major because I didn’t want to have as many requirements. I came back and took a lot of art history classes, and decided to expand my area of focus. There were moments in college where I was convinced I would do a post-bac and become a doctor. That was short-lived, I wanted to become an OB/GYN, but then it was clear to me that I was either going to go into publishing or journalism. So I graduated, had an internship after, and during that internship, I found out I had been accepted into a master’s in journalism program at Northwestern. So I decided to go and do that. I was very fortunate to make that decision and to be able to financially support myself to do that. Really though, if I’m being honest, I was following a couple of Swatties there, as I did not have a super clear vision for what I wanted to do, which is odd. I had worked very hard for all of high school and then came to Swarthmore.
To be honest, Swarthmore for me was so much less about the academic rigor than it was about every other part of my life, because coming into Swarthmore, academic rigor had been the defining characteristic of my life. So when I got to Swarthmore, the most meaningful things for me became the tennis team, my social life, the ways that I could have way more independence and autonomy than I had ever experienced in the container that felt very safe to me personally. Even the idea I would not have the clearest idea of what I wanted to do after graduation is powerful in and of itself, because it had never occurred to me that I could be anything other than exceptionally rigid and driven and have a super linear idea of where I was headed.
I think a lot of people can relate to that, and I think a lot of people don’t transcend that view of themselves at Swarthmore.
You received a degree in journalism at Northwestern and worked at various news-based publications like the NY Magazine, NBC, and Chicago Public Radio. How influential was this foundation in journalism to your current career in publishing, or is it influential?
It’s not.
Do you still see that time of your life as being useful to you and having been a good experience, or do you think that it was a means to an end?
I would say that all my time spent in journalism helped me understand the ways in which I was not equipped to be in journalism. The urgent nature of journalism was not for me; I realized I was much more of a fiction storyteller than a nonfiction storyteller and that journalistic standards of vetting and fact checking and sourcing are of the utmost importance. I found myself much more drawn to the world of stories and storybuilding that didn’t rely on the container of the hard and fast facts of a situation. I was much more interested in exploring what it would be like to have stories that could be fully envisioned from the ground up and were wholly fantastical and created.
How do you see editing — because I know you’re an editor — as an art form and as a creative process?
I have had a lot of lessons throughout my career about empathy when working with creative people. I can be very exacting, and when you think about something like copyediting, which requires a lot of rules and guidelines, there’s a certain control that comes from correcting other people’s work. There’s a certain control because the rules of grammar are binary, either it’s grammatical or it’s not grammatical. So to be able to approach something and to wear the hat of, “Sure, this may not be grammatical, but is it really on me to change the vision of this author’s words? Yes or no? Does it have to do with voice, are there other contexts that are more important to consider than simply whether this sentence is grammatical?”
As an editor, I think it’s my responsibility to bring awareness to the creator, and say, “I don’t think your message is coming through for XYZ reasons, would you consider something else?” As an editor, there are things that we are doing that are much more big picture. If we’re talking about the arc of a story or characterization, those are bigger picture things, but on a line level, there can also be questions about the syntax or whether I know what you’re saying. So with both, it’s a balance of suggesting things, bringing awareness, but ultimately not being whetted to my vision, because I am not the person who made it.
You’ve been a senior executive editor at Penguin Random House, specifically focused on children’s, middle grade, and young adult books, for seven years now. How has it been to be rooted in one job for a relatively long time?
It’s been really special because I joined Random House in late 2018, so I had the benefit of about fifteen months there before the pandemic started, which allowed me to make in-person connections and create a network of colleagues. That was a huge support and boon during the pandemic when we were fully remote and no one was coming into the office. I really like getting to know people, deepening connections, having a sense of loyalty to and pride in a place.
For me, there has been a lot of growth in staying and working through stuff. I think that earlier in my career, I was so focused on ascending that if something felt hard or if I encountered a problem, there was this gut instinct to cut and run or move somewhere else. I think staying in a place through the pandemic has taught me that there is value in working through roadblocks and not just saying “I don’t like this, I’m gonna leave,” and instead being brave enough to have conversations about why something isn’t working, and to expand intimacy and vulnerability with senior management or my colleagues, because I think that’s where a lot of meaning lies.
What’s one thing about your work or a project that surprised or excited you recently?
Sometimes I am quite surprised by the depth of my attachment to the creators and the projects that I work on. Something that I believe is unique to publishing — but because I haven’t worked in another industry I really can’t say — is the relationship that an editor develops with their creators. I say creators, because if you edit novels, you are just saying writers or authors, but I’m also working with illustrators, and sometimes I’m working with people who are both.
For instance, this week, one of my authors, his wife had a baby. We were texting, he was sharing pictures with me, and it’s hard to explain to anybody what it is like to have this relationship, because it is very strange. I know a lot of specific details about people, I know how their brains work, and I can be anything from a therapist to a coach to a lawyer to a creative partner. Sometimes I really am surprised by the ways that a project or a person working on a project can really impact my life and really find their way into the things that matter most to me. And it is something about publishing that can be beautiful and also challenging, because the people matter and the projects matter. At the end of the day, it’s also a business, not purely a friendship, so it is staying true to the nature of what our relationship is.
Random House is a very large company, with, I assume, a corporate culture. How do you reconcile your liberal arts education and the values you learned here with your current work and your everyday experiences?
I’ve been doing this now for fifteen-plus years overall, so I can say that editors, as they progress in their career, build a list of books they publish. I publish around ten to twenty books a year, and I am able to focus on certain areas that matter most to me. For me, a lot of that is around mental health, empowerment, expanding representation around identity. To answer your questions, it’s finding the cross section between the values I think are so important — in particular allowing young people to see themselves and their story reflected in a book — and then understanding that I work for a corporation that ultimately allows me to do my job because the company continues to be sustained by sales.
The beauty of what I do is that I don’t have to have a linear or narrow focus on the types of books. In fact, I do books for newborns through eighteen year olds, I do fiction and nonfiction — so I do books on an array of subjects. So to me, the books that I do almost are so varied in that liberal arts way of not having to focus on certain things. I’ve done books on business, books on mental health, books that encourage math, books that encourage philosophy or psychology, and books just for fun, too. It’s a very diverse array of things that I get to do, and I’ve made a successful career out of that, and I’m able to do it within the corporate structure still.
In the TV show “Younger” or the book “Yellowface,” there are specific representations of publishing. What do they get wrong or right?
I cannot bring myself to watch “Younger.” I have watched one episode of it. I really can’t weigh in on that. I haven’t read “Yellowface.” I have read and watched “American Fiction.” The movie is based on Percival Everrett’s novel “Erasure.” I think what that gets right about publishing is the immense struggle that we continue to go through to represent underrepresented voices, the need for greater diversity in our workforce, and the ways that we tend towards a focus of stories of tragedy or intensity when it comes to representing underrepresented or nonwhite voices, instead of being able to recognize the importance of uplifting joy or not even centering identity in a story by a nonwhite creator. And we’re very aware of the changes that need to be made, and we’re still navigating what exactly that needs to look like. And I know that we talk about it all the time amongst our colleagues, and we’re doing our best, and it’s still not enough.
How do you feel about AI? I don’t want to make everything about AI, but as someone involved in publishing, does AI feel like a relevant part of your work? Are you worried about its influence on publishing, particularly in the creative climate that technology has influenced?
My greatest concern around generative AI would be the devaluation of storytelling, and the lack of understanding about what it means to draw on a truly human or truly personal experience and funnel that into a truly unique piece of art. To say that some piece of writing generated by a robot has merit simply because the words are good is a tragic oversimplification of what it means to create a piece of written work.
What have you been reading or watching lately, and does your work have any influence on the media that you enjoy recreationally?
I’m in the middle of watching “Doc,” which is a trashy medical drama. I’m currently in the final book of Sarah J. Maas’s “Throne of Glass” series. Right now I’m trying and failing to read one book a week for a year, I was on track and then lost it. I’m also in the middle of watching “Untamed” on Netflix. I [recently] finished season three of “The Diplomat.” I definitely need to stay plugged into what parents are watching in order to inform my work for younger kids, and I absolutely need to stay informed about what tweens and teens are watching for my work that’s directed at them. So I absolutely see it as a responsibility to stay informed about pop culture, but it is also a personal love, so it’s not a hardship to stay plugged into that stuff.
How have your Swarthmore experiences and friendships stayed with you as you’ve grown and changed over the years?
I have about six friendships from Swarthmore that continue to mean the world to me, with women who are my closest friends today. None of us live in the same place, so it’s definitely not easy, and we all have different careers and different family structures. But this year, several of us gathered to see Beyoncé in LA. We make our own reunions, but there is something undeniably special about the people that I shared my college years with. And also, whenever I see somebody in New York walking down the street wearing a Swarthmore hat or a Swarthmore T-shirt, whether they’re nineteen or 95, I always stop and say, “Hey, I went to Swarthmore!” So it’s just something that will always be with me.
That’s incredible, I hope to have the same experience. Finally, what did you get out of your liberal arts education at Swarthmore? If you could do it all over, is there anything you would change?
No. Maybe I would not have even started with the honors track, but I don’t even know that I would change that. I was able to feed my own curiosity, which isn’t even a word I necessarily would have used at the time, but I can retroactively see and recognize that I’m a very curious person. I love to follow a spark of interest in something, and I think that’s what a liberal arts education really encourages.
Also, I am able to see how different disciplines really collapse. Perhaps one thing I would do differently, but that doesn’t keep me awake at night, is majoring in history. Because majoring in history is so similar to majoring in English literature in my opinion, so much of it is reading texts and analyzing them, just different types of texts. I think that there are so many things that are cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary, and I couldn’t have understood that at the time but I see that now. It also just gave me a chance to really get to know myself and see what I really didn’t like and what I gravitated toward, what I was good at, what I absolutely wasn’t good at. I learned what linguistics was, and that it isn’t the same thing as English, not even close. I have extremely fond memories of Swarthmore, and I can’t think of anything I would really change.
Thank you so much for doing this with me.
Totally! Thanks so much for asking me, it was a pleasure.
Are you a recent or not-so-recent alumni with a good story to share? Contact mposner1@swarthmore.edu.
