OF THE MANY adjectives that describe Rakia Clark—sharp, ambitious, inquisitive—the one that might best express her career trajectory and her work as an editor, as well as what makes her an effective advocate for her authors, is intentional. Her acquisitions at Mariner Books, the imprint of HarperCollins where she has worked for five years, the past three as an executive editor, are a clear indicator of exactly that quality. She has ushered into print such recent notable books as Chinelo Okparanta’s acclaimed novel Harry Sylvester Bird (2022), Brian Broome’s award-winning memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods (2021), and Angela Chen’s probing nonfiction exploration Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020).
But even before she had secured her position as a top editor at a Big Five publishing house, back when she had no idea what she wanted to do after college, she was intentional in her journey. With the help of her counselor at the career development office at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, she determined exactly what she liked: books, words, ideas. Once she started talking about how much she enjoyed a junior-year seminar in which students wrote essays that would be shared among a small cohort, she realized that editing her fellow students’ words was something that came easy to her, natural even. For her it was essentially an Editing 101 course, even if she didn’t know that was what she was doing at the time. “But I loved it. I loved it,” Clark recalls. “And I was full of ideas, and this was fun to me. I’m grinning now just remembering it.”
Clark graduated from Haverford College in 2001, right as the dot-com bubble was bursting, and she knew that breaking into publishing was going to be challenging. It still is, of course, but in an unstable economy it was perhaps even more difficult that year. After twelve months spent back in her hometown of Atlanta, she moved to the capital of book publishing, New York City, and took the Columbia Publishing Course, a training ground for those interested in working in the industry. It was exactly the on-ramp she needed. “Everything started from that course,” she says. Not only did she receive an education in publishing, but she also received a crash course in making a life in the city. “It wasn’t
