November 2026: True at What Scale? Editing Lived Experience and Cultural Context in Nonfiction

Description

Editors often work with nonfiction pieces that blend personal experience, cultural context, family memory, community knowledge, professional practice, and broader claims. These pieces require more than a standard accuracy check. They require editors to recognize what kind of knowledge is on the page, clarify the scope of a statement, and preserve the author’s authority without allowing one person’s experience to unintentionally stand in for an entire community.

Drawing on her work as editor of the Journal of the American Herbalists Guild, a peer reviewed publication on clinical herbalism, Jackie’s session offers a practical framework for editing pieces rooted in lived experience, cultural knowledge, and specialized practice. Attendees will learn how to distinguish between personal memory, family tradition, community practice, professional observation, cultural context, and researchable claims. The session will also provide language for respectful author queries, especially when an editor is working across difference or when a writer may be generalizing from their own experience without realizing it.

Rather than treating lived experience or culturally rooted writing as something to “prove” or “correct,” this session focuses on editorial discernment: how to honor voice, ask better questions, clarify scope, strengthen reader trust, and support nonfiction that is both accurate and respectful. This session is especially relevant for editors of essays, journals, educational materials, memoir-adjacent work, health and wellness writing, cultural writing, and community-based publications.

Learning Objectives

• Identify whether a nonfiction statement is functioning as personal experience, family tradition, community knowledge, professional observation, cultural context, or a researchable claim.
• Apply a “true at what scale?” framework to clarify scope without flattening author voice or overgeneralizing lived experience.
• Draft respectful, precise author queries that help writers distinguish between personal, cultural, professional, and broader claims.

About the speaker

Jackie Garcia-Morales is an editor, author, and literary agent whose work spans children’s literature, scholarly and nonprofit publishing, and community education. She serves as editor of the Journal of the American Herbalists Guild, a long-running, peer-reviewed publication of the nonprofit American Herbalists Guild, where she works with contributors whose pieces often blend research, practitioner knowledge, cultural context, lived experience, and community-based expertise.

Jackie is also an associate literary agent and foreign rights agent at Storm Literary Agency. A Puerto Rican neurodivergent writer raised in New Jersey, she is the author of the bilingual middle grade novel "Pesky Roots / Raíces fastidiosas," forthcoming from Arte Público Press/Piñata Books in 2026. She is also co-director of The Storytellers Foundation, which produces the Spotify award-winning podcast The Storyteller’s Shelf, founder of the Catalyst Creators Scholarship, and a U.S. Board on Books for Young People member of the Outstanding International Books Committee.

Across these roles, Jackie brings a cross-disciplinary editorial perspective shaped by author care, reader clarity, inclusive language, and the practical realities of publishing.